that if an American commander has reliable intelligence that bounties have been placed on the heads of his or her soldiers, then he or she ought to respond strongly to protect his or her troops?
Or is that a bridge too far?
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26 comments:
I find it impossible to answer your question, because I cannot imagine myself as Commander in Chief of anything, much less of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. I never would have sent them there in the first place.
That is not the point, for God's sake.
It's like asking me what would I do if I were in charge of the gulag.
Threat level assessment is operationally significant. The putative reason is not, other than in assessing the threat level and changes regarding it. In an active combat zone, threat level is assumed to be at the max unless intelligence informs of an impending attack. This is not the case with bounties. Bounties would not materially increase the commitment of already committed fighters (Taliban) fighting to eject a foreign intruder (and to suggest this impugns their honor). Funding and arming them is a different matter, of course.
The bounty thing for already engaged fighters is irrelevant operationally. Where it could signify an operational increase in opposition is bringing other actors into the conflict as bounty hunters interested in the money rather than the cause. Militarily, not of much significance, although it could hit a few "foreign invaders."
Overall, this appears to me to be intentional disinformation, based perhaps on a grain of truth to justify it and concerning which nothing is known publicly other than through undocumented sources apparently involving "raw intelligence." See my post with links here.
Nothing-burger. I am actually anti-Trump and also an anti-war Vietnam vet that recalls the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Saddam's WMD, etc., along with Mike Pompeo's reflection as CIA director, "We lied, we cheated, we stole."
This incident appears to me possibly to be related to the president's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, which was something he promised to do in the campaign. There is a powerful faction in the US government and military that opposes this.
Anyway, bounties would make zero operational difference to field commanders. It's appears to be faux outrage aimed at demonizing opponents in the public and it has been quite effective in this — which is surprising to me since the public has been lied to so many times previously to influence support for policy. It seems that the gullibility of the public is bottomless.
Furthermore, it is hypocritical in that the US funded the Afghan "freedom fighters" to oppose the USSR during the Carter administration at the instigation of National Security Adviser Zbig Brzezinski, who was a proponent of Halford Mackinder's global strategy based on control of the Eurasian land mass that he called "the world island." Mackinder's heartland strategy is still largely in place in US and UK strategic thinking, as modified by Nicholas Spykman's rimland theory.
Without seeing the big picture geopolitically and geostrategically, it is impossible to understand the smaller moves in the game that connected to the whole. Disinformation is an important tactic in this. It is essential to narrative control through the media, thus, "anonymous sources." These anonymous sources not interested in providing information. They are interested in influencing opinion.
Those that wish to understand this kind of thing ("the great game") should also understand it requires study, and that this study requires a lot more than just reading a book or two.
Yes, I agree w the post and furthermore there is a responsibility to investigate the reports to determine if they are reliable.
Then would come the question of exactly what to do if the reports were reliable. In a normal administration, there would be a set of possible responses garnered from military people on the ground and diplomats etc and presented to the President as a set of options for action/decision. That's what wd happen ordinarily I think. In this administration, who knows...
I'm not sure that bounties make zero operational difference to field commanders. Even if they do make zero operational difference, the Russians paying them, if they were doing so, would indicate a ratcheting up of their level of involvement, which is significant in itself. We don't know the timeline so at this point we don't know what connection, if any, there is to the recent US-Taliban agreement.
I've read Mackinder's "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904). Its bearing on the immediate issues here seems to me to be attenuated at best.
Here is an assessment by Paul Robinson, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.
I think Professor Robinson is correct about the role of the Democratic Party establishment in this and Russiagate as a whole. Robinson is a credible voice by a Russia expert. A great deal has been written on this elsewhere. It is a canard.
The question remains as to why certain elements of the "deep state" have piled on. I have explained that above in terms of longstanding US policy to maintain and extend Western global hegemony under the leadership of the US, which the present administration is not willing to climb aboard entirely and is challenging in some ways. Pressure is exerted on the president to conform.
Both constituencies would like to see the president removed from office if possible, and if not, defeated in the coming election.
I would like to see him go, too, but in my view a soft coup is not the way to do it. It's highly dangerous to the political order, and I'm afraid we are already so deep into it that the poisonous effect on democracy will be felt for a long time.
From what I gather the Taliban have not launched attacks on US (or NATO) forces since the US-Taliban agreement was signed in February. However they have continued attacks on Afghan govt forces and, in some cases, civilians.
"I've read Mackinder's "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904). Its bearing on the immediate issues here seems to me to be attenuated at best."
The US and its allies are fighting China and Russia, and Iran, to a degree, for control of Eurasia. This will be the defining conflict of the coming decade if not longer. Afghanistan is a pivot point in relation to Russia, Iran and China, who all have much more national interest involved there than does the US or West. But US withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a serious setback for the West in Central Asia, a sign of declining imperial power.
Mackinder wrote in the early years of the last century, so I agree he cannot be seen as a major force now other than in his continuing influence on the grand scheme of things. But dismissing him would be like dismissing Clausewitz or Mahan. These views have become foundational in geopolitics and geostrategy. Sure there is a lot more on top of this after the passing years, but the outline of the great game was set there. Zbig picked up on it, for example, although before his passing, he did conclude that this was beyond the capacity of the US to carry through militarily without getting stretched too thin. My suspicion is that the president understands the limits of the military and is therefore relying chiefly on economic warfare, with a military threat in the background.
The reality is that to achieve semi-permanent global hegemony, the US and allies have to break Russia and China (and Iran) up into smaller countries that can be disarmed and can no longer ally against the Western empire. Strategists on all sides understand this as the bottom line. Afghanistan, the "evil axis" of Iraq, Syria, Iran and North Korea were stepping stone in this larger project. The US bogged down with the entrance of Russia to Syria. Compared to this Russia is minor player in Afghanistan. But getting the US and NATO out of Afghanistan is also an objective, e.g., to break out of military encirclement to the southeastern underbelly.
I realize that this is a sweeping statement. But this is a blog comment, after all, and this is about the grand chessboard, with a lot of pieces on the board. The "squares" are laid out geographically, and while national boundaries change the terrain doesn't, nor do the people. The US is not in Afghanistan to "spread freedom and democracy" to Afghans. Anyone believing that is naive. The president is saying that holding position there is costing too much in blood and treasure. The foreign policy people are saying, nonsense. This is about domination and trillions of dollars are on the table, not to mention global dominance of the West. Holding position is worthwhile even if we cannot "win." See Pepe Escobar, Empire of Chaos.
Something similar is going on between China and India, too, but India is not a major player yet. It will be soon enough, having a billion + population, being IT savvy, and already a nuclear power. Indonesia will be coming online, too, and China and Indonesia are already bumping up against each other.
Lots happening everywhere as the pace of change increases exponentially, but I would contend that the focus is now on Eurasia especially owing to the nascent Sino-Russian strategic alliance, New Silk Roads, and Belt & Road Initiative. A position in Afghanistan puts the US (and NATO) in the middle of this militarily, with the potential to control the region.
The most promising way of looking at this now is in terms of world-systems, I believe. A key question is whether material conditions are determinative.
The geopolitical and material angle is one important part, but only one part, of the story. The ideational and normative aspects of international politics (taking "normative" in its multiple senses) are also significant; they are not epiphenomenal to underlying power and geopolitical considerations (though in any specific case they may be).
Coming down from abstractions to a more granular level, the US would not have gone into Afghanistan in 2001 had not been for 9/11. The main stated rationale was not to "spread freedom and democracy" to Afghans -- recall that George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign opposed "nation-building," a code phrase for exactly such a democracy crusade; rather, the rationale was to displace the Taliban regime that had given a safe haven to Al Qaeda. That's not to say one can ignore geopolitical considerations of the sort you mention, though I'm not sure I would accept all the details of the analysis. But it is worth recalling Bush's skepticism about "nation-building" as a candidate -- it was only after 9/11 that the orientation of policy changed, and only with the ill-advised and illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq that "spreading freedom" to the Middle East came to be one of the stated rationales of US policy in the region.
I agree there is geopolitical competition going on between Russia and China and the US, and the US foreign policy establishment, to the extent that phrase still makes sense, favors a more far-flung global military footprint for the US than Trump seems to. (Thus the f.p. establishment doesn't like for ex. reducing the number of US soldiers in Germany, a move that imo makes sense, though not exactly for Trump's stated reasons.)
I don't see Afghanistan as being quite as central geopolitically as you suggest though. It is strategically located but not as central, for various reasons, as in the days of the "great game". The Soviets had a bad time there, and now NATO has been there for almost 20 years. The immediate problem is that there is understandably so much accumulated distrust betw the warring parties -- esp the Taliban and the existing Afghan govt -- that it's not clear what the path to an end is. My own view is that the best chance for some kind of negotiated settlement that would last wd be to involve Pakistan, a long-time (if somewhat covert) sponsor of the Taliban and other similar groups, and also an ostensible US client state in some respects, as well as India (and others) in some sort of multi-party guarantee of an Afghan settlement. (Not an original idea w me.) But the Taliban has preferred to meet w the US separately in Qatar, and it's been hard just to get the Taliban and Afghan govt into some semblance of talks. Then there are various factions and splinter groups that the Taliban themselves don't control. These are among the reasons the final stages of the exit process for the US have been so protracted.
Ooops, didn't mean to post that as 'anonymous'. Sorry.
Don't know much about war, but I thought it was shoot or be snot. No need to incentivise. Get the help out.
Don't know much about war, but I thought it was shoot or be snot. No need to incentivise. Get the help out.
Don't know much about war, but I thought it was shoot or be snot. No need to incentivise. Get the help out.
"The geopolitical and material angle is one important part, but only one part, of the story. The ideational and normative aspects of international politics (taking "normative" in its multiple senses) are also significant; they are not epiphenomenal to underlying power and geopolitical considerations (though in any specific case they may be)."
I agree. Marx was correct in calling attention to the foundational role of material conditions but I think he went too far in claiming material conditions as the exclusive foundation. But that came from his assumption of materialism. The parameters are more complex in my view, which makes room for traditionalism. I view the present in the context of a dialectical conflict between liberalisms and traditionalism for dominance in an era of globalization (that is now on pause).
There has been a tendency to conflate materialism as an ontological positions with epistemological implications with naturalism as a methodological assumption of scientific method. Naturalism as a methodological assumption of scientific method as an epistemological modality does not imply materialism as an ontological assumption. One can be a naturalist with respect to science and not for other epistemological categories, e.g., involving quality that cannot be enumerated or measured empirically since much of the qualitative is neither discrete or continuous in the sense that science applies these terms. The frequency of a note can be measured but sound of the note cannot be so captured. Locke's primary and secondary qualities come to mind. But this distinction was attacked by Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, etc. It arises today in the so-called hard problem of consciousness. This is just with respect to the sensible. The ideational and valuational further complicate this issue. It's not so easy reducing everything to the material without extending the definition of matter beyond the observable and measurable.
Then there are the different lens through which experience occurs. There are world views, e.g., traditional and cultural world views, and different subsets within a world view.
For example, in foreign relations there is an American view, a Russian view, etc. and within these views different schools of thought and practice based on different ways of seeing that are grounded in different assumptions, criteria, etc.
continued
continuation
The way I learned it as an operations officer, policy determines grand strategy. Grand strategy determines regional and local strategy, strategy determines tactic. Policy is determined by policy and policy is based on values. Values tend to be similar in a world view but are not homogenous, which leads to politics, given that in the US policy is determined by civilians. Some of these civilians are politicians subject to elections and others are part of the administrative state that constitutes a professional class. Aspects of the administrative state constitute the deep state, senior intelligence and senior military including military not on active duty but involved in government or advising government, and senior bureaucrats.
There is a new discipline in history called cliodynamics as a from of scientific history that uses mathematical models. Peter Turchin has written extensively on this. One of the parameters he uses to measure social change is the level of homogeneity of the elite. Where factional difference manifest among elites, the likelihood of change increases proportionally. Turchin has devised ways of measuring this empirically and applying the data to a formal model. He predicted the present turmoil some years ago based on this analysis.
This is happening the US now almost across the board, including foreign policy. The effect is observable at the grass roots level in the struggle for "hearts and minds."
I am convinced that the present kerfuffle over "bounties" is part of that "dialectic" between conflicting forces.
There are underlying reasons for what happens in the "news" that aren't themselves news and are only discussed among those that study these matters. This generally comes down to competing interests. So one question that immediately suggests itself is cui bono, to whose benefit. This brings in motivation. Some of this may be material — there are trillions of dollars on the table. But a lot of it is either power-related or ideological. It is difficult to pin these down to material forces at work, whereas economic forces can be largely reduced to markets and market action. But even here risk cannot be reduced formulae owing to "radical uncertainty" owing to emergence in complex adaptive systems.
While some or much of this may seem tangential to the original point about bounties, I don't think that the alleged phenomenon and its appreciation can be approached other than superficially without setting it a conception of world system analysis. That is say, it is part of a complex pattern that has an internal logic to it, one one hand, and an aspect that beyond human comprehension owing to its dynamic nature in an environment of complexity.
This is what makes it fascinating and why I have studied it since I was in the military back then. BTW, I got radicalized in the military when I awoke to what was really going on. The Gulf of Tonkin was one of the things that contributed to this awakening. That was in 1964. Subsequently, tens of thousands of US service personnel lost their lives and many more were harmed physically or psychologically, some grievously. And the destruction of the "enemy" was far worse.
Similarly, on this bounty thing now, I smell a rat. This leak appears to have been designed to provoke outrage, both against the president politically and also again his policy of American First, which much of the foreign policy elite views as a return to isolationism. Even if true, it is being blown up way out proportion. An inquiring mind would like to know why. I maintain that the best explanation needs to be set in terms of an approach to world systems analysis. We can argue over which approach is most adequate. I have offered the outline of one and appreciate the engagement of others in the debate. Anyway, shows what a look into what appears to be a simple news report can lead to on reflection.
Of course, you are correct in the expectation that a halfway sane commander in chief would raise holy hell. But given the context and the increasingly dangerous manipulation of these kinds of unconfirmed reports, it may have been helpful to qualify your disgust by saying, "if in fact the story has merit" or words to that effect. Otherwise, it would be rather odd to have a strong reaction to a story that is suspect to begin with.
Here is where I get upset: The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the National Security Agency “strongly dissented from other intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia paid bounties for the killing of US soldiers in Afghanistan.”
But I'll bet that MSNBC and St. Rachel will not report same. “They put your mind
right in a bag and take it wherever they want.” – Malcolm X
The liberals are playing with fire. Trump is drowning, but this sort of thing becomes dangerously close to a lifeline.
"Of course, you are correct in the expectation that a halfway sane commander in chief would raise holy hell."
This, I think, misses the point. The objection is not that Trump failed to alert the military. This would already have been done as soon as the raw intelligence came if deemed a credible threat that needed to be address. This doesn't need elevation to the general staff, defsec and certainly not cinc.
The actual objection is that the president has not reacted to Russia, when he should be "raising holy hell with them," e.g., imposing further sanctions, which Nancy Pelosi called on him to do today. The Democrats are busy legislating this.
The Democrats are politicizing this and running away with it as a campaign. As a vet, I find it inappropriate. Moroever, it is downright dangerous. One expects the neocons to play with fire (nuclear war) but the left is supposed to oppose this. The so-called left in the US is the Democratic Party and they are leading the charge in beating the war drums. It's insanity when no one is threatening the US, the US has by far the largest and most liberally funded military, and is surrounding— oops, I mean containing — its "adversaries" (Russia and China) with a ring of military bases and carrier groups.
This will just give me another reason to vote for a 3rd party candidate that represents my values, as if I needed another reason after the party establishment marginalized Bernie. Now the establishment is talking about uniting the party. Really?
This is a bunch of losers. Watch them manage the impossible and lose to Trump by dissing a significant amount of their base.
The once-regular commenter Dean has not commented for a while here. He might have just decided to take a break from commenting (something I might think about myself), but at any rate I hope he is ok.
So to return to the original question of the post...it seems that, no, we cannot agree. :)
Here is an interesting parallel. Suppose a US president strongly suspects that his predecessor has been murdered by a conspiracy involving the agents of another power. Should that President mobilise the forces of the state to track down those conspirators and sheet the responsibility home to the Government that (in his opinion) probably organised the assassination? Or should he organise a white -washing commission devoted to proving the (in his opinion false) proposition that the Presidential assassination was the work of a lone gunman? LBJ chose the latter option for fear that a really rigorous investigation might compel him to go to war with Cuba thus precipitating a nuclear War. I think he made the right decision.
Now suppose two imperial states have been conducting a series of proxy wars in a far-away country. When state A occupied the country, state B subsidised, armed and supported local militias to kill the soldiers of state A. And when state B occupied the country, state A (in a rather more niggardly fashion) encouraged local militias to kill the soldiers of state B by paying bounties for the deaths of state B soldiers. In the first case the fact that the government of state A was perfectly well aware that the government of state B was subsidising the slaughter of its soldiers did not stop that government coming to an important series of agreements with the government of state B. Why then should the government of state B get on its high horse, sabotaging possibly useful agreements just because the government of state A was doing something very similar to what the Government of state B had been doing thirty years earlier?
Now none of this is to say of course that the intelligence leaks are not likely to be true (I think that they probably *are* true because this is just the kind of thing that Putin might get up to ) or that Trump is not culpably negligent for not attending to his briefings (which it is very likely what actually happened). But if the intelligence was veridical and if he had read, learned and inwardly digested the reports, I don’t think he would have been obviously remiss if he had decided to turn a blind eye to Putin’s nasty little schemes. States which subsidise the killing of other states’ soldiers in proxy wars have no reasonable grounds for complaint if other states subsidise the killing of theirs.
I can see Bob Ackermann rolling his eyes at this, but since the extent of the material world is constituted or defined by the continual application of the scientific method -- what better account of the material world is there? -- the epistemology of science certainly seems to have ontological implications. The application of the scientific method could or will find, or has found out things that make the material world seem at least partly ghostly. Today particles composed of four charm quarks, tomorrow consciousness. If so, then the on going application of the scientific method -- whatever that might be -- has ontological consequences; if not, then there are still ontological consequences.
@ Charles Pigden
The argument from symmetry may well have a certain appeal as a matter of logic.
However, when one looks at the details of what the Trump administration has actually been doing in recent months (and years) vis-a-vis Russia, it makes less sense imo. Despite Trump's apparent personal fondness for Putin, the policies of the Trump admin toward Russia -- with probably the (large) exception of Syria and Russia's role there -- have not been conciliatory or held out the possibility of many "useful agreements." Trump has withdrawn the US from the INF (intermediate nuclear forces) treaty, claiming Russian violations, and also withdrawn the US from the Open Skies agreement. The Trump admin has increased the US mil presence in Poland and is poised perhaps to increase it further, if it goes through w plans to reduce the number of US soldiers in Germany and move some of them to Eastern Europe. Sanctions over the Russian annexation of Crimea have been maintained, and US mil aid to Ukraine was resumed after Trump paused it (as congressional Repubs during the impeachment proceedings never tired of mentioning).
In this context, refraining from complaining about the bounty payments, if they happened, to promote the possibility of US-Russian agreements wd not fit the overall Trump admin policy toward Russia, which has not been oriented to finding agreement(s). As for whether in the abstract the US has standing to complain now, given US policy when the USSR was in Afghanistan in the 1980s, I think that may be debatable. But my basic pt is that afaik there is no major nuclear arms agreement, for ex, on the horizon whose preservation wd require silence about Russian bounty payments (if they occurred). I believe the START treaty is up for renewal or renegotiation but I'm not aware that the process is moving. Trump has apparently made noises about wanting to bring Russia back into the G-8 but that's a separate matter.
Anyway there is a history of "non-linkage," one cd say, in some of these matters. Nixon and Kissinger were able to pursue the SALT process w USSR to a successful conclusion even while the US was bombing Russia's ally N. Vietnam. If Putin and Trump wanted to reach some kind of deal on arms or other subjects, it's not clear that US protests and/or action of some kind over the bounty payments would be an obstacle.
This all assumes the bounty payments were made. While it seems not unlikely, we don't know whether they were, and we still don't really know for sure whether this matter ever made it into Trump's briefings (oral or written) or not.
So what you are saying LFC is that a policy of turning a blind eye to the supposed bounties might have been OK if Trump had been pursuing an intelligent policy of constructive engagement with Russia but since the policy he has actually been pursuing is an incoherent mix of subservience and belligerence, there is no greater good that he might have served by not making a fuss?
Charles Pigden,
Yes, roughly.
Putting the bounty question to one side now, I'm going to make a few observations before shutting off my computer for the evening. (I've cut down this comment in an effort to keep it short.)
I think Trump came into office with a few instincts that, properly fleshed out and implemented (operationalized, to use an ugly word), might have furnished the elements of at least a semi-coherent foreign policy. (Not necessarily one that I would have entirely agreed with by any means, but that's not the point.) As his first -- and probably only -- term in office draws to its end, the only area where I really see any coherence in the Trump approach to the world is on the trade issue, where he renegotiated the trade agreement w Canada and Mexico, and used tariffs vs China as leverage to get it into negotiations (that have not yet produced an agreement, but I suppose might yet).
Almost everything else, from what I can tell as a fairly casual observer, has either been marked by incoherence or has been basically a disaster (e.g., policy on Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Iran, immigration policy, N. Korea/S. Korea, reversal of Obama's opening to Cuba). It's true that the US signed a deal with the Taliban, but it remains to be seen how that will play out. I'll stop there.
Too LFC - sounds sensible to me.
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