by Ian Morris
Bin Laden had a lot in common with the Mad Mahdi but was much more dangerous, because he had a real plan. Knowing that al-Qaeda could never directly threaten the United States’ survival, he instead crafted a two-part, indirect approach. His first step was to use violence to overthrow any government, from Algeria to Indonesia, that he judged insufficiently Islamist (what al-Qaeda calls “the near enemy”), thus creating a caliphate of all the faithful; the second, to entangle the United States (“the distant enemy”) in wars it could not afford and did not understand, until it tired of propping up non-Islamist regimes. “Then,” al-Qaeda’s number two man explained, “history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.”
As I write, in mid-2013, it looks as if history is failing to take this turn. Far from overthrowing the near enemy, al-Qaeda has inspired fear and loathing all across the Middle East by murdering more Arabs than Americans. Its affiliates may be able to profit from disorder in Libya and Syria, but Afghanistan, Sudan, and Somalia, which all had Islamist regimes before bin Laden’s war began, have since shed them, and the countries where Islamists have put serious pressure on governments—Algeria, Mali, Yemen, Pakistan—all lie well outside the strategically crucial, oil-rich Gulf region. Only Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal, poses a real threat to global order (“A stable Afghanistan is not essential; a stable Pakistan is essential,” President Obama’s former special adviser on the region liked to say).
The United States’ grand strategy against al-Qaeda’s war on its near enemy was to defang the Islamists’ appeal by promoting democratic reforms—to “send forth the news,” President Bush (the Younger) said, “from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East,” he insisted, “will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
Arguably, the fall of tyrants in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen since 2011 has vindicated this strategy—although, as Bush himself recognized, “modernization is not the same as Westernization; representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures.” Freed from authoritarian rulers, Arab voters consistently elected Islamists, but as I write, the consequences are still unclear. In Egypt the army abandoned a dictator to his fate in 2011 but overthrew an elected Islamist president two years later. In Libya, Islamist extremists took root during the civil war that ended Qaddafi’s rule and, using weapons looted from his regime, spread jihad into Mali. Syria, much like Somalia and Lebanon before it, has disintegrated into a land of warlords, some of them just as violent as al-Qaeda. Overall, the emerging post–Arab Spring world looks somewhat democratic but highly unstable. It is largely Islamist, largely poor, badly governed, mistrustful of America, and even more mistrustful of Israel. It is hard to know who, out of Bush and bin Laden, would have liked it less.
The second part of al-Qaeda’s plot, to suck the United States into so many ruinous wars that it would turn its back on the vast Islamic inner rim, started well. Bin Laden judged rightly that by hitting the United States so hard in 2001, he would leave Americans no option but to invade Afghanistan to root him out. This saddled the United States with its longest-ever war, and while the American decision to make an invasion of Iraq part of its response to terrorism was hardly a direct response to the events of September 11, the march on Baghdad was precisely the kind of overreaction that bin Laden had hoped for.
Where bin Laden went disastrously wrong, though, was in thinking that an overcommitted United States would either bankrupt itself or back away from southwest Asia. Instead, it stayed the course, killed bin Laden, and largely managed to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda” (Barack Obama’s definition of the goal). The cost of doing this, though, was to be dragged into yet another set of problems strikingly like those the British globocop wrestled with a century earlier.
The war the United States got when it invaded Iraq in 2003 was, in a remarkable number of ways, a kind of rerun of the Boer War that Britain fought against the South African Republic and Orange Free State between 1899 and 1902. The Boer and Iraq Wars were both preemptive, launched to head off future aggression. In both 1899 and 2003, critics often blamed war on an unholy alliance of self-interested politicians and businessmen greedy for natural resources—gold and diamonds in South Africa, oil in Iraq. The politicians leading the two globocops into war, however, often saw themselves as humanitarians, not materialists, fighting to protect the downtrodden (Shiites and Kurds in Iraq, black Africans in the Boer War), but regardless of which interpretation held the most truth, Britain and the United States both found that their decisions to use force divided opinion at home and turned old allies against them.
Where the Boer and Iraq Wars differed most was in their opening stages. In 2003 the United States overwhelmed Iraq’s army, while in 1899 Britain blundered into defeat after defeat, sending soldiers in closed ranks across open terrain into withering artillery and rifle fire. Within eighteen months, though, the British had enough boots on the ground to bludgeon the Boer armies to pieces—only to find, as the Americans would do 103 years later, that their foes melted away and became insurgents.
The British army in 1900 and the American in 2003 were built to fight conventional wars, and at first both found counterinsurgency heavy going. For the British, it meant chasing tiny detachments, which the Boers called commandos, across vast stretches of veld. “We lived in momentary expectation of the order, ‘Saddle-up!’” one officer recalled. “Many a time we did saddle-up, but however quick we might be we were never quick enough.” In a similar mood more than a century later, a U.S. marine told his newly arrived commanding officer: “Sir, we patrol until we hit an IED, then we call in a medevac2 and go back; and then we do it again the next day.”
Both armies learned quickly. New commanders (Herbert Kitchener for the British, David Petraeus for the Americans) worked out counterinsurgency strategies and got the upper hand. But both globocops paid a price for this success, because the obvious way to fight irregular enemies was to turn to what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side,” and this was highly unpopular at home and among allies.
The United States spied on its own citizens, detained prisoners indefinitely, and denied them the protection of the Geneva Conventions. It tortured some of its captives and shipped others to countries that recognized no restraints at all, and even after these methods were renounced, targeted killings by remotely piloted aircraft continued to excite opposition. But compared with Britain’s treatment of South Africans, Americans never got very dark at all. Kitchener burned thousands of farms, shot the insurgents’ cattle, and herded their families into concentration camps. Roughly a quarter of the detainees—overwhelmingly women and children—died of disease and starvation.
Overall, despite missteps, the United States handled its version of the Boer War much better than the British handled the original, squandering far less blood and gold and inflicting less pain. Of roughly 1.5 million American troops who served in Iraq, fewer than 5,000 died; Britain sent similar numbers to South Africa but lost 22,000 (mostly from disease). Roughly one Iraqi civilian in every three hundred died violently during the American occupation, the vast majority at the hands of other Iraqis and foreign militants in sectarian fighting, but Britain was ten times as murderous, killing one South African in thirty during the Boer War. America’s war was also more cost-effective. The final bill, after the interest on borrowing is paid off, may be about $2.4 trillion, or roughly one-sixth of the U.S. GDP in 2011, but Britain’s £211 billion tab for the Boer War represented one-third of its 1902 GDP.
In the end, Britain and the United States both won their Boer Wars, but to do this, both had to define down what victory meant. Britain drove South Africa’s prewar leader Paul Kruger into exile, only to hand over much of what he had wanted to postwar South African governments run by former insurgents. Similarly, the United States toppled
Saddam, only to see Iraqis elect governments with strong ties to the insurgents and Iran.
The lesson seems to be that it is easy for a globocop to get into a Boertype war in a resource-rich part of the inner rim but difficult, divisive, and expensive to get out again. A determined globocop will probably always be able to win a Boer War, but a globocop that makes a habit of fighting Boer Wars will probably not hang on to its job for long.
Britain learned these lessons and avoided further Boer Wars. Time will tell whether the United States can follow the same path. On the positive side, al-Qaeda and its affiliates are in general retreat, and American dependence on Persian Gulf oil is declining (thanks to greater efficiency and booming domestic production, American energy imports in 2014 should be smaller than at any time since 1987). But on the negative side, the Afghan War looks likely to end even less satisfactorily than the Iraq War, the Arab Spring has spawned economic collapse and—particularly in the diplomatic debacle over Syria in September 2013—damaged American credibility, and Iran is close to acquiring nuclear weapons—which, Henry Kissinger warned during the darkest days of the Iraq War, “would be one of the worst strategic nightmares that America could imagine.” Since then, tight sanctions, assassinations of scientists, and fiendishly clever cyberattacks have driven Iran to the negotiating table, but they cannot undo the nuclear advances it has already made.
If Iran ever puts a live warhead on a missile, it risks war with Israel and perhaps with the United States too. But it does not need to go that far, because it can probably bully and blackmail its neighbors simply by being known to be capable of going nuclear at short notice. Possibly the United States and southwest Asia would learn to live with this, just as the United States and northeast Asia have (so far) lived with a nuclear North Korea. Equally possibly, though, an almost-nuclear Iran would send wealthy neighbors—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—rushing to the almost-nuclear threshold too. At that point, Israel and/or the United States might well feel that another preemptive war—the mother of all Boer Wars—would be less bad than the risk of a Middle Eastern nuclear war.
Currently, southwest Asia consumes almost one-sixth of the American military budget. Given the continuing threats from terrorism, Islamism, and the Iranian nuclear program, plus (at least in the short term) the continuing importance of the region’s oil, this seems unlikely to fall anytime soon, even assuming that the United States avoids another Boer War. Such costs will perhaps be bearable if southwest Asia remains America’s major military focus; but of all the uncertainties in the coming decade, this seems the least certain of all.
The Inevitable Analogy
“When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told West Point cadets in 2011, “our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.”
But that has not stopped military men from trying. Plans, after all, have to be made and weapon systems procured, and in the 1990s, with the Soviet Union gone and the number of interstate conflicts falling, one expert after another concluded that there would be no more big wars. The struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001 seemed to confirm this prognosis. From here on out, it would be counterinsurgency all the way.
So it was that when I had an opportunity in early 2012 to visit the U.S. Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California,3 I found myself in the middle of a mock Middle Eastern village, complete with mosques and Arabic-speaking actors. I joined a party on an unfinished, windblown rooftop to watch troops trying their hand at taking “Afghan” elders to a meeting—only for make-believe jihadists to ambush them in the alleys. A bomb went off in a trash can with a deafening blast. Snipers opened up from windows and hillsides. A Humvee broke down, blocking a crucial intersection. It was unbelievably loud, dusty, and confusing (Figure 7.5), but the convoy finally fought its way out.
Figure 7.5. Real war games: all hell breaks loose in 2011 in a mock Middle Eastern village at the U.S. Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California.
Fort Irwin, a chunk of the Mojave Desert as big as the state of Rhode Island, is the last place American troops go before deploying overseas. For more than thirty years, it has been a barometer of American thinking about coming engagements. Had I shown up in 1980, when the center opened, I would have seen long-range shoot-outs between hundreds of tanks, skies full of fighters, and entire infantry battalions storming drab replicas of central European towns. But that all changed in 2005, when concerns about counterinsurgency took over. All the fake apartment blocks were torn down, except for one ersatz town, saved for old times’ sake. In their place, the imitation minarets and madrassas that I saw rose from the sand.
If I get a chance to make another visit anytime soon, the scenery in the Mojave Desert will have changed yet again. Counterinsurgency was the face of battle while the globocop was strong enough to deter all rivals from trying anything else, but how much longer, the army is now asking, will that hold true? Hoping for the best but planning for the worst, the center is bringing back the tanks. Middle Eastern mock-ups are making way for a range of scenarios, from blitzkrieg breakthroughs to gunfights with gangsters. The new settings could represent almost any place from Syria to South Korea, but major wars are definitely back on the army’s agenda.
Despite the globocop’s travails in southwest Asia, it is increasingly looking as if the region where it is failing most seriously at preventing the rise of strategic rivals is actually East Asia. Along the continent’s outer rim—the chain of islands from Japan to Jakarta (Figure 7.6)—the struggle has generally gone well. In some ways, in fact, developments in outer-rim East Asia have been very like those in western Europe. Japan, like West Germany, was demilitarized and occupied in 1945 and then partially remilitarized and admitted to world markets under American supervision. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all followed suit, turning into economic giants, but even in the 1980s, when Japan was booming even faster than West Germany and its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds had reached enormous heights, American anxiety about having created a Japanese rival remained muted.
Figure 7.6. Island chains: how the world looks from Beijing
East Asia’s inner rim, however, has been a different story. The People’s Republic of China controls not only thousands of miles of inner-rim coastline but also a great swath of the Eurasian heartland, putting it in much the same position that Germany would have been in had it won either of the world wars. For two millennia, this setting made China one of the world’s biggest economies, but since the Industrial Revolution it has left the nation dependent on importing natural resources and exporting finished products through the outer rim. Every year, $5 trillion in goods passes through the South China Sea, investing not just the Strait of Malacca but also tiny specks of rock such as the Spratly and Paracel Islands (called the Nansha and Xisha Islands in Chinese) with huge strategic significance.
By the time Mao Zedong seized power in 1949, it looked as if the successive outer-rim globocops had encircled China with island chains that could strangle its economy. Mao’s initial response was to seek drastic remedies. In his first five years, he tried to loosen the globocop’s grip by sending millions of men to fight in Korea and threatening to invade Taiwan, but in both cases American nuclear blackmail persuaded him to back down. Next, he decided to ignore geopolitics and to jump-start a Chinese industrial revolution by sheer willpower. However, when he commanded peasants to switch from farming to backyard ironworking, twenty million starved. Undeterred, Mao proclaimed a cultural revolution, urging younger communists to tear down everything old (including the economy) before building a utopia fueled by nothing more solid than Mao Zedong Thought. Once again, disaster ensued.
Things got so bad by 1972 that Mao felt compelled to signal his openness to change in the grandest possible way. For some time, Richard Nixon had been angling to bring China and the United States closer together to oppose the Soviet Union; now, to general astoni
shment, Mao invited America’s former red-baiter in chief to Beijing. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon grandiloquently announced, but in fact it was only after Mao was safely dead that saner counsels really prevailed in China. By that point, in the late 1970s, China’s economy needed to grow by 8 percent every year for decades to avoid famines even worse than the ones it had already endured. Recognizing this, Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world economy. Since China could not break the island chains by force (it had virtually no navy, and the vast People’s Liberation Army, old-fashioned at the best of times, had come close to collapse during the Cultural Revolution), this meant making nice with the globocop.
Deng’s policies unleashed environmental devastation and rampant corruption, but they also delivered the goods. During the 1990s, a staggering 150 million farmers fled the impoverished interior for factories near the coast, effectively creating a new Chicago every year. Moving to a city typically raised a worker’s income by 50 percent, and because the new urbanites still needed to eat, those who stayed on the farm and sold food to the cities also saw wages rise by 6 percent per year. By 2006, China’s economy was nine times bigger than it had been when Mao died thirty years earlier.
But this was just the beginning. Fourteen thousand new cars were hitting China’s roads every day in 2006, and nearly fifty-three thousand miles of new roads were being built for them to drive on. By 2030, officials estimated, these cars and roads would bring another 400 million peasants into the cities, and to accommodate them, China would erect more than half of all the homes being built on the planet. Between 1976 and 2006, China’s share of the world’s economic output more than tripled, from 4.5 to 15.4 percent. Across the same years the American share declined, and although the United States was still ahead, producing 19.5 percent of the world’s GDP, there was no denying that the globocop now had a rival.