Afghanistan’s Barbarian Problem
In my two previous posts I first presented a theory of barbarians, and then drew a modern analogy with a controversial program intended to mitigate crime in California.
But an even better modern analogy to historical barbarian conflicts is the war in which the U.S. has been engaged in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, since the Twin Towers fell sixteen years ago today.
Without retelling the entire story of the U.S.’s so-called “Global War on Terror”, or the various historical events that preceded it (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, CIA support for the mujahideen, the rise of the Taliban), the thing I have to observe is that al-Qaeda and especially the Taliban have drawn the U.S. into a conflict which has proven far more expensive for the U.S. than it has for them.
It is a war that has pitted the world’s only superpower against relatively rag-tag groups of Islamic militants, who have used highly asymmetric tactics and strategies — suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket attacks, etc. — to advance their aims. The structure of this conflict turns out to be a remarkably good fit for the geopolitical logic of historical barbarian conflicts.
Historically, barbarian groups have had at least one great strategic advantage in their depredations on more civilized neighbors: it has generally been cheaper for them to war against their enemies for the purpose of plundering them than it has been for their enemies to suppress them.
Between their warlike ways and their relative poverty, barbarians have had both the means and the incentive to raid their enemies and sometimes take land from them. Both the seagoing Norse who menaced Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries and the Magyar horsemen who menaced it from the late 9th to mid-10th century were alike in this respect.
Civilized armies, on the other hand, have always faced very different geopolitical imperatives. Their function has generally been loss prevention and mitigation. From Sargon of Akkad to the Roman Empire to Medieval Europe to various Chinese dynasties, relatively civilized governments have had to incur economic and political costs to create the armed forces necessary to suppress, punish, and possibly subdue barbarians.
In other words, conflicts between barbarians and civilized, “urbanite” empires are characterized by cost asymmetries.
But does the same logic obtain for the modern U.S. against the Taliban and other militant groups? How applicable are my 2,000-year-old anecdotes to contemporary geopolitical realities?
Consider a few estimates of the costs of the war:
To date, the U.S. has spent something on the order of $1.07 trillion (by some estimates, $1.6 trillion as of 2014) on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including $773 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan specifically, and reconstruction efforts merely in Afghanistan have cost $117 billion.
Here, though, I should note that there is some controversy, because these figures apparently count only direct expenditures. A study from Brown University found a cost of $3.6 trillion for the cost of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria from 2001–2016, factoring in counterterrorism costs.
But even this is not necessarily the final word, because an earlier 2013 working paper from Harvard came up with an estimate of $4-$6 trillion for Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind anywhere else.
There have also, of course, been the human costs. In all, the war in Afghanistan alone has accounted for some 2,350 U.S. deaths, and 3,500 for U.S. deaths plus allied deaths. About 20,000 U.S. soldiers have been wounded. I’ll set aside any considerations of the Afghan-Pakistani death toll, estimated at up to 173,000 with another 183,000 wounded, on the grounds that these deaths imposed costs chiefly on Afghan and Pakistani society rather than that of the U.S.
What about the Taliban death toll? This source from 2014 is about the best I could find, and it states that at the time, Afghan police and army were killing an average of 12 Taliban fighters a day, with about 720 casualties for January and February of 2014 alone. It gives an estimate of 20,000 to 35,000 total casualties for the Taliban.
Apparently the U.S. and NATO are not in the habit of recording Taliban casualty figures, so we may never have very good estimates. Still, if we take the aforementioned estimates and select the low figure of 20,000, and forget about the past three years — obviously if it was anything like 20,000 in March of 2014, it must be much higher by now — we’re still left with Taliban casualties an order of magnitude greater than those of the U.S.
And yet, for all this, and despite peak troop levels of 100,000 under President Obama, the U.S. cannot be described as winning the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, President Trump has recently made headlines for his plan to send more troops back into Afghanistan — there are about 8,300 as of May of 2017 — precisely because the Taliban have actually started to retake more territory.
The Taliban are now in possession of 48 out of Afghanistan’s 400 administrative districts, and the war has become more violent than ever. The group ISIS has also established a foothold in Afghanistan, contributing to the mayhem.
On an average day, the jihadists account for 31 Afghan military casualties and nine Afghan civilian casualties, and their suicide bombers have made Kabul itself the most dangerous place in the country. Even in some of the more northern areas where these groups have little or no presence, fractious warlords are carving out their own domains.
The fact that the Taliban alone have handily sustained over an order of magnitude more casualties than the U.S. might seem, on the surface, to undermine my attempted analogy with historical barbarian conflicts and their cost asymmetries.
But the Taliban and the other jihadist groups — al-Qaeda, ISIS, etc. — have demonstrated many times that they are willing to die to win. And instead of going extinct, these groups have been able to replenish their ranks.
The Taliban specifically have support from many rural Afghans and many ethnic Pashtuns, in no small part because they provide a form of justice that is seen as fair, not biased by tribal or ethnic considerations and not subject to bribes.
The contrast is with public institutions: many Afghans see the Afghan Local Police in particular as predatory (the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police, on the other hand, have high public confidence).
This combination of a potent ideology of violence and martyrdom and a relatively effective justice system (by the standards of the culture), coupled with massive involvement in the opium poppy and heroin trade, is the secret to the Taliban’s resilience.
The Taliban are able to absorb far higher human costs than the U.S. because their ideology diminishes the political costs of these deaths, and their asymmetric tactics — suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), rocket attacks, etc. — don’t have the kind of overhead associated with airbases, aircraft, and other aspects of the U.S. and allied war effort.
For all that there are bound to be limits to any historical analogy, there’s a solid case that Afghanistan has a barbarian problem — a fairly impressive one, at that, given that said barbarians have also managed to fight the world’s only superpower and global hegemon to a standstill.
