Blood, Treasure, and Honor

Ahhhh, and the plot thickens in Afghanistan.  Readers of this blog know my stance on Afghanistan, I have written about it extensively here, so there is no need to rehash my views, go back and read them.  Let me just put a disclaimer out there before we get into this, because I think it’s important.  This blog is not meant to be a place where I publish research of the academic kind, nor is my writing heremeant to represent weeks of work culling through data and peer reviewed journals, or any other kind of science.  I don’t formally identify references or even proof read most of the time, so please, these are my thoughts, most of the time in a very stream of consciousness manner, treat them as such.

Before we get to the meat here, a short lesson on war theory.  When nations, non state actors, or even individuals go to war, they weight, knowingly or not, the risk and reward of gaining and losing three things.  They are, blood, treasure, and honor.  Lets take them one by one.

Blood is the most obvious here, but in a sense, everything is relative.  If Israel goes to war with a neighbor and loses 3,000 soldiers, that is a major loss of military personnel given the size of the population, not to mention the high value that its society places on the lives of its soldiers.  Yes, this is a politically incorrect thing to say, but a very important point, not all societies place high value on the individual lives of their soldiers.  See for example the Iran vs Iraq war where millions of young kids where slaughtered on both sides fighting over desert land that was worth little.  In terms of the United States of America, our threshold for blood has changed massively over the years, think back to the Civil War when thousands of soldiers on both sides walked knowingly into gun fire sacrificing their lives.  In World War Two we lost about 400K men, obviously an acceptable price for saving the world from fascism.  In Vietnam, we lost 58K men, obviously too many for the country to handle.  We’ve lost less than 1K men in Afghanistan so far, yet it seems that number has been far too high.  The point I’m trying to make here is two fold.  The amount of blood you are willing to lose depends on, amongst other things, the necessity of the war and your society’s feelings towards the death of its young soldiers, which may change over time, or not.

Treasure is a little more complicated.  It can represent many things, including actual treasure, as in money, gold, art, artifacts, etc.  Treasure can also be military hardware or intellectual property.  But we mostly think of treasure as being either land, the resources held within it, or the people themselves who live on that land.

Honor is obviously the most complicated of the three, as different societies and different military and political leaders have different views over the course of time.  Hitler wanted to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jewish race, the United States of America invaded Afghanistan largely because it had harbored a terrorist who bombed two sky scrapers in NYC, some countries, people, or non state actors fight for religious reasons.  Often wars occur for nationalistic reasons, the need to feel different from each other by drawing borders.  We go to war in the name of honor all the time and are willing to lose blood and treasure for it.  Honor also encompasses peace, or the submission of an adversary.  Think of Israel’s recent war against Hezbollah in Lebanon as a perfect example.

Now, before going to war, these three things need to be weighed against one another.  How much blood and treasure are you willing to give up to attain your objective, be it treasure, honor, or both.  In certain circumstances, wars are fought over blood, we refer to it as genocide.  But this really falls under the umbrella of honor, as that genocide normally takes place in the name of either nationalism or religion.  As well, one must calculate the odds of winning, ironically, this is often the most overlooked, honor takes precedence far more often.

Ok that concludes our little lesson, now let’s get to the point.  The United States of America went to Afghanistan primarily for honor, to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, his supporters, and the Afghan regime that harbored him in retaliation for 9/11.  I don’t believe we went there to do real nation building, which, we are in fact doing right now.  We obviously didn’t go there for treasure, Afghanistan has for many centuries been known as the worst place on earth, nothing but desert, rock, and sun.  Invading armies have been through those parts several times and have found nothing but death and despair, just ask the Russian, that war brought down the Soviet Union.

Until yesterday it seemed as if Afghanistan was the definition of quagmire.  Why were we still there if we hadn’t found Bin Laden and didn’t have much chance of doing so?  Why were we still there when his terrorist network had been broken up and dispersed? Were we doing nation building?  What exactly was the mission in Afghanistan, no one really knew, and it seem that whatever it was we were doing there, it was failing, miserably.  The security situation continues to worsen, we have made little to no progress on the political front, no surprise there, and we have gone back to tacitly allowing the opium trade to flourish as a means to paying off warlords that we need for security reasons on our side.  The nation’s leader, Hamid Karzai is nothing more than a thug, and to make matters worse, he’s not even a powerful thug, he’s a scared little child of a leader.  In other words, there is zero reason that we needed to be doing nation building in the part of the world, it was never going to work.  We’ve got tens of thousands of our boys climbing around in the mountains there chasing ghosts.  Kill one and someone will take his place tomorrow.  Are we spilling a lot of blood over there, no, in relative terms, I hate to be cold and calculated, but that’s the truth, it’s really insignificant.  But the treasure we are spending to keep those boys there is, a lesson the Russians learned a few decades ago, far beyond what we can handle.  The progress we are making in rebuilding that country, if there is any at all, is not nearly worth the money and military resources which could be spent elsewhere.

Sooooo, why the hell are we still there?  Well that answer isn’t simple, but it walks along the lines of honor.  This administration, nor any other, wants to pull out of Afghanistan for fear that it would seem a big blow to the prestige of the American military, and open a pandora’s box of sorts regarding a middle eastern counter insurgency being able to defeat the vaunted US military.  Undoubtedly, it would, as it has become increasingly obvious that the current mix of forces and capabilities within our military are not designed for this type of national building / asymmetric warfare mission.  We knew this a long time ago, as far back as Somalia in the 90′s, but because people and logistics don’t add up to major dollars in defense spending to contractors, it’s hard to get a major bump on the appropriations committee.  Big naval gun ships, air superiority platforms, and heavy artillery add up to big dollars in defense spending.  As well, some in the higher ranks of the military have purposely fought against the necessary spending on resources that would be needed to correctly fight wars of this kind.  They are doing it for two reasons.  One, the US military hates nation building, it’s messy, it takes a long time, it takes a lot of people, it takes coordination with allies, and it’s just not fun.  They are hoping that without the necessary resources, many within the military and government will think twice about stepping into operations of this kind.  Second, there is a certain group within the military that believes we aught to be planning our acquisition of military resources around an eventual war with China.  I won’t go in to depth on the meaning of this regarding all the different platforms, but in essence, it’s heavier, higher tech, and packs a bigger punch.  Personally, I find these people to be delusional, but although the risk of not being prepared for this type of war is far too high as opposed to not preparing for wars of the Afghan kind, it’s good that we have those voices and pull in that direction at times.

Up until yesterday Afghanistan seemed a completely lost cause, with no objective, and way out of whack spending of resources for little gain.  And then it was announced that geologist have found a boat load of mineral deposits in Afghanistan.  You can read the complete article from The New York Times here.  If you want to save time, the graphic below explains it well.

I’m sorry, but I find it really ironic that invading armies have been through this region of the world over and over again, and labeled the place one of the worst and most isolated on earth, it caused the downfall of the Soviet empire, and now we find a huge mineral deposit there?  Could this really be true?

Well look, I have no clue, I’m not a geologist, but I do have a background in what’s most likely to happen there if it is true.  Let’s discuss.

Here’s what typically happens when large mineral deposits are found in far corners of the earth where viable governments don’t exist.  The multinational firm which buys the rights to mine, or drill, or scrape, or whatever comes in with its own security protection and an armada of hired political and social specialists.  In essence, these private corporations are better at doing nation building than the US military, largely because they are profit driven, so they invest in the necessary resources.  The multinational corporation will buy off those leaders and local police or military which it needs to in order to secure safe passage in and out of the country.  They will often do small local social projects in an attempt to create a good name for themselves within and outside of the country.  The corporation will upgrade the local infrastructure, not because they want to increase the standard of living for the local population, but because they need to infrastructure to move the material and their people.  Everything is profit driven, and they will spend as much money as it takes to get that stuff out of the ground as long as it shows them a good profit margin at the end of the day.

Along with the infrastructure, multinationals often have an effect on the political system.  In the research I have done in the past, it has become quite obvious to me that economic advances almost always lead advances in the political structure and rule of law.  Multinationals often require rule of law to operate profitably within the borders of a nation, they will not make a large investment in infrastructure until that happens.  As a result, you often get local governments bowing to the wishes of these corporations in order to get said investment in their economy.  In this sense, multinational corporations are often a driving force for human rights.  So all in all, the people of Afghanistan will benefit from the extraction of minerals.  Yes, a good portion of the local investment will go to war lords and local tribal chiefs contracted by the multinational companies to provide security.  But with the influx of a greater number of wester people comes western ideas, values, and technology.

There are several problems here though, the biggest of which is the central government, or lack there of.  Afghanistan as a country should not exist, and in a practical sense, it doesn’t.  The central government’s reach does not extend much beyond a few large cities, and even there it is impotent at best.  Who is going to negotiate mineral rights with the multi nationals?  How is the revenue going to be split between the different regions, a la Iraq which still can’t come to a decision and has a long history of strong central governance, everything being relative of course.  This is a huge unknown in Afghanistan, without a strong central government everything is up in the air.

So is this a quagmire any longer?  Should the United States of America double down and commit itself, in full heart, to a nation building exercise for the purpose of having our multinational corporations mine the earth there?

Well, this is the type of thing that could actually transform the region, by first transforming it economically.  Also, as China races around the world to secure mineral assets, especially of the rare earth metals kind which are supposedly found in the ground there, it is important that we have access to these mineral deposits.  But as you know, I have said in the past the the US is not an empire, specifically because when we invade or do nation building, we leave, and we leave an independent government in place.  Yes, these governments are often friendly to us, but that does not fit the definition of empire.  If we stay in Afghanistan, mine that land, and do what’s needed to be done regarding their central government, along with taking a piece of the economic pie, we will in a sense be acting as an empire with this land being a mining outpost.  See that morally as you wish, I’m not so cool with it.

What about our military?  We will have to double down and do this thing right.  No more talk of withdrawing troops, we will have to commit to be there for the next 20 years, en force.  Our government will have to explain to its people why our soldiers are over there fighting so that our corporations can mine the land.  Neither of these things is going to happen in my mind, we will take half measures on both and fuck it up, because we’re just not good at this type of stuff and our people don’t really like it when our soldiers die for economic purposes.  If you think people put up a big fuss over us going into Iraq for oil, which I never really believed was the case, then just you wait until they can’t even connect the dots between soldiers fighting and their gas pump.

So at the end of the day, here’s what I think happens.  The US military will sit there for another couple of years, wasting time, being relatively useless to a situation they aren’t prepared to handle, while lobbyists from the multinationals ask the government to please stay, provide force protection, and get them into that country.  The US military will probably pull out at some point, in a quiet way, as our government gets fed up with zero progress on the ground.  The multinationals will eventually decided to go in alone, years if not decades from now and do it correctly.  My question is though, does the US worry about China taking its place as provider of force protection within the region as we pull out?  Are we worried enough to stay, just to be there for the strategic value of the land?  I doubt it.

So in the end, the US has to weigh the possible gain in treasure, which could be significant and help pay for this god forsaken war, versus the loss of blood, a backlash from its people over having its troops there protecting minerals, and becoming an empire in the classical sense.  Ehhhh, I say GTFO, it’s not worth it.

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