Forget G-Zero, it’s China that’s leading the world
This is the third in a series of responses to Ian Bremmer’s excerpt of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. The first response can be read here and the second here.
Ian Bremmer is launching his new book with an eye-opening observation above the uncertain future of global order. This time he is warning us of the dangers of having a world with no clear leader. In his view, the United States and Europe are in a weak position to sustain any hegemonic position. In particular, their focus on austerity measures can complicate their role as military leaders of the world (e.g., NATO’s role). Moreover, multilateral organizations, such as the G7 or the G20, will not do the trick either. The G7 is in the middle of the worst crisis in almost a century, and the G20 has members with preferences that are hard to aggregate. BRICS, the organization supposedly coordinating the efforts of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is too young and preoccupied with other issues to act as the new hegemon. What, then? Where is the world going? Who will emerge as the new leader?
The obvious candidate is China. I have not read the entire book, so I do not know precisely what Bremmer’s position is on China. But because the book’s argument is that there is no real global leader now, I assume he believes China will not be taking that role in the future either. I want to argue, in contrast, that China has begun to play that role and has the potential to become a hegemon. Yet, if China rises to be the global leader, there will be major tensions in the institutional foundations of global capitalism as we know them today. As China’s leadership role grows, the global institutions that have ruled the world in the last 20 or so years will have to change.
Bremmer argues that the most important tools for establishing global power and leadership today are the traditional economic levers and the cyber-capacity to conduct industrial espionage and protect or control information and communication across borders. I would argue that China’s proven track record in both of these areas makes it an ideal candidate for world leader. It is the champion of cyber-censorship and the only country that has tamed large global corporations, compelling them to share user information with the government. Moreover, any major company doing business in China already has bent over backwards to share information and intellectual property with its “forced” local partners (i.e., partners that are the product of mandatory joint ventures dictated by the government of Beijing or any of the Chinese provinces).
China is champion when it comes to using economic tools to impose global discipline, induce countries to do what it wants, and change global conditions. China indirectly determined interest rates in the United States for years, acting as the largest buyers of Treasury bonds. It also uses conditional loans to get African governments to do what it wants, including favoring Chinese companies over locals or Western companies. Furthermore, China has increased its power within the IMF and other multilateral organizations and has been sought after by the EU to participate in its bailout fund.
In addition, China has already been challenging the power of Western countries and organizations for years. It is emerging as a superpower on the sidelines, securing access to natural resources and exercising soft as well as military power in its backyard and beyond. In Africa, China has filled the void left by international organizations, acting as a development agency and as a soft (sometimes hard) imperial power. Many criticize the means, but nobody questions the results, e.g., new roads, bridges, buildings, ports, railways, etc. A similar phenomenon is beginning in Latin America, especially in natural resources. In particular, Chinese investments in oil exploration in Cuba are part of this trend and show another important dynamic as well: China likes to play in the U.S.’s backyard. In fact, China, more often than not, works against U.S. wishes, whether by not supporting efforts to impose tight sanctions on Iran, or pushing the boundaries of the South China Sea, or not being as active as it could be when it comes to North Korea.
So, what if China does become the next global hegemon? There will be three major changes in the global diplomatic and economic equilibrium. First, multilateral organizations, as well as the United States and Europe, have been exporting democracy and human rights as universal values. Many times they have imposed democracy or human rights provisions as part of conditional agreements tied to loans or foreign aid. China does not believe in those values and does not play by those rules. Chinese interference in Sudan, basically promoting its own investments, weakened Western efforts to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government for its human rights violations and support for terrorism. In 2004 China also rescued Angola and its autocratic leaders with a credit line when the IMF was about to impose tough conditions, mostly focused on opening the books of the country and its oil company, tied to a loan package.
Why G-Zero is a good thing
This is the second in a series of responses to Ian Bremmer’s excerpt of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. The first response can be read here.
It’s said that predictions are risky business, especially those about the future. No one knows that better than Ian Bremmer, who in addition to his multiple books has created one of the more successful risk analysis organizations. Being in the business of highlighting risks, he has for the past few years focused on the breakdown of the world order most of us grew up with, whether a 20th century world of great-power struggles or an early 21st century world of American economic and military preponderance. Now, says Bremmer, those systems are finished and in their stead we have… nothing.
It’s a compelling, alarming and yet exhilarating vision – though few probably embrace that last adjective. Compelling because it admits that most of the models we use to predict what will be are based on a world that no longer exists and hence are likely to be wrong. Alarming because it leaves us with a tabula rasa whose outcomes are utterly uncertain. Yet exhilarating because it offers the promise of a brave new world that may go in any direction, including more productive and positive ones than many observers currently assume.
Bremmer extrapolates from current trends about what this world might look like, and tends to focus on the dangers that lurk rather than the diamonds in the rough. He sees tough times for China, whose model, he predicts, will be less able to adapt to a world of increased competition for natural resources and more state capitalism that competes directly with the Chinese. He sees hard roads for weak states and troubled societies, with Syria’s grinding civil war and lack of international action just a harbinger. He sees a United States constrained by debt and a public looking inward, and a euro zone mired in years of crisis. And while he does acknowledge that even a G-Zero world will have winners such as Brazil and Turkey, he sees the emerging vacuum as more of a challenge than an opportunity.
As a description of the world we are entering, it is trenchant. Yes, the United States will remain the world’s largest economy for a while to come and its most dominant military power for a generation. But the coercive power of those assets is and will be ever more muted. Fewer societies around the world believe that the American model is the one to copy, and a large military can preserve security but not prosperity. Multiple states around the globe have the confidence, the leadership and the means to chart their own way and refuse to bow to the will of any other nation. And as the 20th century mechanisms for handling all sorts of international affairs decay, unpredictable crises and unforeseeable outcomes will become more common.
But that doesn’t mean that the international system will be less stable or that prosperity and security will not proliferate. There is, in fact, a risk that peace will break out, rendering the traditional tools of states less useful. It’s clear already that global companies are reaping astonishing benefits from the growth of a global middle class and from a largely anarchic but effective flow of commerce and capital that seems to be working brilliantly almost everywhere except in its 20th century heartlands of Europe and the United States.
In essence, if the G-Zero idea is pushed further, you could be left with a world that truly doesn’t look like the 20th century, or like most centuries. It could be a world where the absence of great-power conflict – the rivalry of China and the United States notwithstanding – leads not to chaos and anarchy but to stability and, at most, low-level armed conflicts. You could be in a world where the dominant theme is the churning and rapid transition of billions of people from agrarian and urban poverty into a middle class that consumes apartments, white goods, food, clothing and entertainment. And you could be in a world where tension is ubiquitous, uncertainty constant, but actual lethal and society-destroying conflict preciously rare.
Perhaps we are approaching G-0 but the current global power will not go away so easily. They won’t go gently to that good night and will act in dangerous ways to prove to their people that they were still a country envision by God himself. The danger we face with peak resources and explosive population growth will pale in comparison to the old models of the late 20th century. “good riddance”? I really hope so.
Since when has G-anything run the world?
This is part of a series of responses to Ian Bremmer’s excerpt of Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World.
Ian Bremmer has, as always, made a perceptive and provocative observation about the state of the world. Where I would respectfully differ from him is over the true significance of this observation.
It really comes down to what is meant by “global leadership,” on the one hand, and “global governance,” on the other. It is conventional to call for more of the former and to bewail the weaknesses of the latter. And with Bremmer I would accept that there is a shortage of such leadership and that global governance is patchy at best. The world is certainly not being run by the G-20, or by a G-anything else.
But the question we should ask is: “So what?” Or, by way of extension: “So what’s new?”
For a start, I do not recall a time during my working life of, so far, 32 years, when the world was truly being run by G-anything. I remember being more than a little excited when in 1982, as a cub reporter at the Economist, I was sent to cover the Williamsburg Summit of the G-7. I felt flattered to be sent, until I realized that nothing really happened at these summits beyond the slight editing of a banal communiqué.
The important thing about these summits, and about the G-20 summits of today, is not the meeting itself but the process that leads up to it. Governments are forced to take part in the sharing of information and ideas and some semblance of cooperation; and, just as crucially, for a brief period before the summit, international affairs break through the normal domestic preoccupations of national leaders. Furthermore, the global scrutiny generated by summits builds at least some sort of a barrier against non-cooperative, even aggressive, behavior – especially trade protectionism, but probably on security issues as well.
In a world in which power is more widely dispersed than ever before, thanks to what Fareed Zakaria pertinently called “the rise of the rest,” that process of cooperative discussion and mutual restraint is, it seems to me, the best that we should hope for from global governance. Since the Lehman shock of 2008, this process has worked passably well: There has been no substantial retreat from globalization, no big resort to beggar-my-neighbor policies, no naked attempt to exploit the economic weakness of America or Europe.
A thoughtful article. The G-whatever can’t and shouldn’t try to contol the world economy, in fact their governments shouldn’t even try it in their own domestic economies but leave a level playing field for the private sector.
The good and the bad of globalisation is in the detail: it can be good insofar as it creates mutual economic interests and trading which discourages conflict and the prospects of war (the devil at work in humankind). It can be bad if a few corporations have the various governments in their pockets to extinguish local companies, creating imperfect competition and toxic effects. The latter is what the banking industry seems to have done in the West.
Should economists be “imagineers” of our future?
By Mark Thoma The opinions expressed are his own.
This essay is a response to Roger Martin’s “The limits of the scientific method in economics and the world” (part one and part two), recently published on Retuers.com.
Roger Martin is unhappy with the state of economics. One charge is that:
[an economist] predicts a future that is based on the past. And when it is anything but, he returns to the same tools to do it again, believing that in doing so he is being meritoriously scientific. … Extrapolating the future to be a straight-line projection of the past is neither accurate, nor is it helpful in creating better understanding and newer ideas.
As I will discuss further below, I agree that macroeconomists need to fix their models. But I don’t think that predicting the future based upon “a straight-line projection of the past” is the problem. Let me explain why, first in a relatively narrow sense, and then more broadly.
This year’s Nobel prize award to Thomas Sargent and the previous award to Robert Lucas were partly in recognition of their development of the tools and techniques that economists need to go beyond simply trying to extrapolate the future from the past, a procedure that can lead forecasters astray.
Prior to Robert Lucas, economists analyzing policy interventions by monetary or fiscal authorities did exactly as charged above, they extrapolated based upon the past and an assumed unchanging future. But the (often false) assumption that the future would be like the past is at the heart of what is known as the Lucas critique.
I usually don’t listen to economists for financial information. I go with my outsourced cfo services for information on my industry. Every industry is effected differently in a downturn.
The limits of the scientific method in economics and the world
By Roger Martin The opinions expressed are his own.
Part one of this essay was published Thursday. This is part two.
As the power of the scientific method has encroached further than its applicability warrants into fields such as economics and business, its predictions of the future become ever more erroneous. In this list, we can include virtually every economic prognostication from the first half of 2008, and countless market research studies that misjudge consumer interest in the new product concepts that they test.
Were he alive today, Charles Sanders Peirce, a turn-of-the-20th-century American pragmatist philosopher, would be unsurprised at the shoddy results of these analyses. A brilliant thinker, Peirce is less famous than his peers William James and John Dewey, mainly because he was an ornery and unpleasant character. However, Peirce had an almost entirely overlooked yet extremely insightful theory applicable to modern scientific work. He concluded that no new idea was ever derived from the analysis of the past using inductive and deductive logic – the two forms of logic our modern scientific method utilize.
These forms of logic can only prove things in the past, so whether business people, economists and scientists realize it or not, the only thing about the future that the application of deductive or inductive logical analysis can predict is a simple extrapolation of the past. That is very useful for studies of things in the Aristotelian camp of cannot be other than they are. If we find some property of granite by studying existing hunks of granite, we can safely extrapolate that in the future, hunks of granite will have those properties.
However, deductive and inductive logical analyses aren’t so hot for things that can be other than they are – like economy for example. These things change constantly due to the interactions of the people and organizations. The fall of 2008 wasn’t an extrapolation of the past – it was discontinuous with the past.
If economists were being Peircian, when they saw an anomalous situation of the unprecedented economic meltdown of fall 2008, they would have taken all of our disparate knowledge and mingled it together creatively to ask: what on earth could be going on here? Rather than forgetting entirely that their theories were demonstrated to be totally lacking, and then going on to analyze some more and predict more based on those theories, they would have created a new hypothesis to explain what just happened. This would be what Peirce evocatively called ‘a logical leap of the mind’ and ‘an inference to the best explanation.’
Physics doesn’t apply to the demand side because economists can ignore the depreciation of automobiles owned by consumers but the depreciation of identical cars owned by Hertz and Avis do depreciate.
So in economics the Laws of Physics are affected by semantics. So the depreciation of hundreds of millions of cars around the world do not affect the Net Domestic Product of any country.
http://www.spectacle.org/1199/wargame.ht ml
The limits of the scientific method in economics and the world
By Roger Martin The opinions expressed are his own.
This is part one of this essay. Read part two here.
As the economy teeters and the capital markets gyrate, I can’t get out of my mind the evening of May 19, 2009. We were near the stock market nadir and fears were cresting that we were heading straight into the next Great Depression. I was invited to a dinner along with half a dozen tables of guests to hear a very prominent macroeconomist opine on the state of the economy and the path to recovery.
The economist held forth with a detailed, analytical account of what had caused the economic meltdown in the second half of 2008 and the path that he predicted recovery would take. I was struck by how scientific he was, spewing myriad statistics, employing technical terms by the boatload, and praising his econometric model. It was ‘very sophisticated’. Given the nods and encouraged looks in the room, it seemed as though he had provided great comfort to the guests; they could go to bed confident that thanks to his science, they could trust that this man knew where we were headed.
I wasn’t quite so confident. Being the curious sort, before coming to dinner I had checked his forecast from a year earlier, mere months before the crash. His spring 2008 forecast for the second half of 2008 was for modest positive economic growth for America. This was not unusual; no credible economist predicted anything less rosy for the back half of 2008, although many now claim that they did. I don’t blame or ridicule him for being cautiously optimistic mere months before the worst economic downturn in 80 years. Economic forecasting is fraught with peril.
For me, the striking thing about the evening was that nothing changed about his models after they were shown to be hopelessly wide of the mark. He just loaded up the equations, dumped in the latest numbers and started crunching away. I asked him whether he had altered his models in the wake of his dreadful forecast of 2008; stunningly, he hadn’t thought of the question.
It struck me then and still does that this dinner is illustrative of a fundamental blind spot in modern science. It has ventured far afield of its natural limits and is both creating problems and inhibiting progress.
Yes, but…aren’t you just saying Science is a progression by which human knowledge is built up over time ?
Blaise Pascal in 1635 noted that Man is full of hubris : the world is not what it is. It’s what we know it to be. As our knowledge grows, it changes.
Thomas Kuhn said the logic of scientific revolutions is always a paradigm shift – rejecting the previous paradigm to move forward.
Nicholas Talleb said : until we know differently, the future will always be seen as an incrementally larger version of past trends. But this is wrong. Change happens through big non-incremental shocks to the system.
If Pascal, Kuhn and Talleb are correct, your economist is simply following in very good well-worn footsteps ?
On the other hand, when in 2004-05 we saw housing prices across the USA rising at 15-20% p.a., but disposable incomes only rising at 3% p.a., surely we should have suspected a bubble ?
Don’t overestimate Afghanistan pessimism
This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.” David Rohde’s response can be read here and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s response can be read here.
By James Dobbins The views expressed are his own.
Rory Stewart maintains that it is “not simply difficult, but impossible” to build an Afghan state. Presumably, this is meant hyperbolically, since Afghanistan has been recognized as an independent state far longer than any of its northern or southern neighbors.
It is true that the Afghan state had almost no capacity a decade ago, after twenty years of civil war, and that it still struggles to deliver basic public services. Nevertheless, nothing in Stewart’s pessimistic assessment would lead one to realize that since 2001 Afghanistan’s licit GDP has risen by 300 percent, that tax collection as a percentage of GDP now exceeds that of Pakistan, that school attendance has risen eightfold, that the country’s literacy rate will triple in 10 years if these children are permitted to stay in school, that 80 percent of the population has access to basic health care faculties (albeit often distant and intermittent), that child mortality has dropped by one third as a result, and that despite the ongoing conflict longevity is increasing. Yet another striking statistic is that today almost half of Afghan households have telephones.
Multiple polls commissioned by independent news and other organizations consistently reveal an Afghan population that sees improvement in its well-being, has a favorable view of its government and is optimistic about its future. Indeed for the past couple of years the Afghans have rated their government and its leadership higher than Americans do theirs.
Stewart seems surprised at his failure to convince American and European officials, academic colleagues and even his own students of the fruitlessness of international efforts to help modernize and develop Afghanistan. His deeply pessimistic view rests on his own very considerable personal experience and that of others he knows. This is important information, to be taken seriously coming from someone as well traveled and perceptive as Stewart. Yet when anecdotal and empirical data diverge so widely, as they do in this instance, most observers will conclude that the truth lies somewhere in between.
Could the author please verify the following claims:
child mortality has dropped by one third – and – longevity is increasing.
Independent, verifiable estimates rate a rapid increase in child mortality, at one child in four below the age of five years, and a rapid reduction in longevity, from 44 to 42 years.
Even if this is wrong, which it isn’t, I’m not sure a longevity rate of 44 years, and a child mortality rate exceeding 25 percent is anything to boast about.
Playing fast and loose with the truth is one of the main reasons we’re in this mess.
Only a politician would claim that “the truth lies somewhere in between.” !!!!!
The truth lies in verifiable data, properly collected, independently assessed and accurately reported.
Where the Afghanistan effort broke down
This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.” David Rohde’s response can be read here.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter The views expressed are her own.
This fall I am teaching a big introductory course to the first-year Masters of Public Affairs students at the Woodrow Wilson School called Politics and Public Policy. The focus of the first lecture, delivered by one of my colleagues, as the necessary intersection of good policy, good politics, and good practice. In other words, the best policy in the world doesn’t make any difference if it is not politically feasible; conversely, what is politically feasible may not be worth doing if it is not at least better policy than the status quo. And even where good policy is politically feasible, it must also be implementable – not just in theory, but in practice.
The intersection of these three circles came to mind as I read Rory Stewart’s achingly honest and thoughtful account of his experience in Afghanistan. For a long time I was convinced that the NATO intervention in Afghanistan could be successful at building a functioning Afghan government that would provide basic services to its citizens. My views were largely shaped by my regular conversations with my long-time friend Sarah Chayes, who lived in Kandahar for much of past decade running first a dairy cooperative and then a soap and fragrance business with Afghans. We were failing, in her view, because of the high NATO tolerance for the cancerous corruption that was sucking the life out of the country, starting at the top. Her book Punishment of Virtue tells the tale, describing how Afghans genuinely committed to rebuilding their country have been systematically driven out or killed by their compatriots who are profiting from the enormous in-flux of money and opportunity that inevitably accompanies large-scale Western intervention in a poor country. She thought, and I agreed, that the U.S. had had an opportunity to help rebuild a very different Afghanistan immediately after the invasion, and that it was still possible to empower the good guys if we were really willing to take on the bad guys profiting at the local, regional, and national level.
Over the past two years, I have reluctantly changed my mind. I have come to believe that where the problem is a predatory state, which the very presence of massive Western resources tends to fuel, it is essentially impossible for outsiders to spur or even effectively support a process of reform from within when we are a big part of the problem by being there in the first place. Stewart makes the argument succinctly and effectively: “the international community necessarily [lacks] the knowledge, the power, and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.”
I would add a much more personal dimension, one that is consistent with a 21st century focus on social actors and social relations as well as on governments and inter-governmental relations. The “international community” does not engage with Afghans. Individual men and women (mostly men) do. Those individuals — diplomats, soldiers, development professionals – develop personal relationships with Afghan officials at the national, provincial, and local level. They have to work together on common programs; moreover, the Americans or Europeans are doing their best to cultivate personal relationship in part to garner exactly the knowledge they know they lack. But once those relationships are established, how exactly is a general or a captain, an ambassador or a political counselor, a USAID Mission Director or a field development expert supposed to turn to his or her Afghan counterparts and interlocutors and explain that they should really stop taking bribes and looting the funds intended for their fellow Afghans? And once the denial is issued, as of course it must be, then what? Accuse him or her of lying? The problems that are most central cannot even be talked about honestly. They are always someone else’s fault. But if they cannot be acknowledged, they cannot be resolved.
It is at this micro-level that policies must actually be implemented. And it is at this level that I conclude state-building military interventions are much more likely to fail than to succeed. The interventions that I count as successes – albeit highly qualified ones – are East Timor, Kosovo, and now Libya. All were launched in the face of crimes against humanity on a scale sufficient to shock the global conscience. All were relatively short. And all were marked by a relatively light military footprint on the part of the interveners – only air power in the cases of Kosovo and Libya, limited Australian troops on the ground in the case of East Timor – aimed primarily at stopping the superior force and creating a safe space for a process of national self-determination to take place (albeit under close international supervision). Foreign combat forces deployed over years rather than months tend to generate their own antibodies.
Three quick points:
(1) You may have set the bar too high in defining success. Progress made counts for something, even if the historical deficit of millennia cannot be entirely paid.
(2) Too much of these analyses seem to me to have a political subtext, carefully distinguishing the Bush intervention from the Obama. But when the state in question is the worst kind, an entrenched totalitarian type, won’t the military footprint of necessity be larger? Otherwise, Bad becomes Good.
(3) Was the Civil War a successful intervention? Certainly not in the short term. In the long term, probably yes.
Creating a “light, long term footprint” in Afghanistan
By David Rohde The views expressed are his own.
This is a response to Rory Stewart’s book excerpt, “My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention.”
The most important phrase in Stewart’s essay is his statement that a “light, long-term footprint” should be adopted in Afghanistan. I agree but he paints a dark picture of all Western efforts in the country.
While Stewart is correct in many of his arguments, he presents a seductively simplistic picture of abject failure. Unquestionably, Washington has focused too much on the military effort. And Stewart is right to argue against a policy of simply pouring in more foreign troops. Yet his portrait of foreigners achieving nothing in a decade stokes a dangerous isolationism gaining credence in both liberal and conservative circles in the West.
It is presented in subtle terms, but Stewart’s argument of cultural differences plays into an ugly, colonial-era view that Afghanistan and the greater Middle East are inherently backward. The region’s people, culture and faith, an extreme interpretation of the argument goes, have nothing in common with the West.
The region is not inherently backward, nor anti-Western. It is enduring a long and bloody conflict between religious conservatives and urban liberals. Instead of walking away, the United States and Europe must find a more effective way to back those liberals over the long-term.
The notion that the west can simply walk away from Afghanistan is an appealing fantasy. A hasty American withdrawal and rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will strengthen the Pakistani Taliban’s effort to seize control of Pakistan and its nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed Taliban state will destabilize the greater Middle East, a region the world economy still depends on for oil. Unless Washington adopts radically new energy policies and stances toward Israel, the U.S. will need stability in the Greater Middle East for decades to come.
My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention
By Rory Stewart The views expressed are his own.
I returned to Afghanistan (after spending a short time at Harvard) in 2005. And when I heard that the British government was about to send three thousand soldiers into Helmand, I was confident that there would soon be a widespread insurgency. I also predicted that the military would demand more troops, and would get dragged ever deeper.
It wasn’t that I had any particular skill in predicting the future. I failed to predict that Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak would fall. I was wrong about Iraq. And my prediction for Helmand wasn’t based on any knowledge of Helmand. It was simply that I recognized the mindset and the actions of the NATO governments from Iraq. And I wasn’t alone in warning against the deployment. Many others predicted the same thing in Helmand. A military friend of mine had returned from a reconnaissance trip saying, “There isn’t an insurgency, but you can have one if you want one.” The Helmand surge continued regardless. The British government seemed to have a momentum, quite distinct from any individual politician or policy-maker. Troops were increased from two hundred U.S. Special Forces in 2005 to three thousand British soldiers in 2006.
At the time, senior officials reassured me that they understood the danger of being dragged in too deep. Two offered to sign a document saying that if the three thousand troops didn’t “establish governance, economic development, and security” within six months, they would admit the policy was a mistake, rather than claim that the problem had simply been strategy and resources. But I did not force them to sign. And when six months passed and the situation had worsened, the same officials supported the call to increase the number of troops to five thousand, and a few months later to seven thousand. I began writing and speaking publicly against the policy. I argued that what was needed was not a surge but a reduction to a light long-term footprint.
This put me in a difficult position because the policy-makers were my friends and I lived in Kabul, where I had just started an NGO, restoring part of the historic city and establishing an institute for traditional crafts. My personal life and work indebted me to many of the people whose policies and governments I was criticizing. I found myself writing op-eds against generals who had been my hosts; giving academic lectures mocking the books and theories written by friends; and publicly debating an ambassador whom I admired. I was calling on the governments that were giving money to my NGO to send less money to Afghanistan. I was arguing against fighting the Taliban while many of the philanthropists who supported my work did so out of hatred of the Taliban. Many of my upper-class Afghan friends who had returned from the West to Kabul and were relying on the international community to build a state were particularly confused and hurt by my arguments. In retrospect and in the circumstances, I am astonished how forgiving they all were. Only one ambassador gently asked whether I could stop criticizing his country, in return for the millions his nation’s taxpayers were giving to our NGO. But when I wouldn’t make the commitment, the money still came.
Most of the internationals I knew in Kabul disagreed with me strongly. They said that I didn’t know what I was talking about. And in many ways they were right. I was certainly not an expert on Afghanistan. Academics such as Tom Barfield and Barnett Rubin are truly scholars of Afghanistan. Afghan statesman such as Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad have a much more detailed sense and understanding of Afghan history and politics. Journalists such as Ahmed Rashid have a much better sense of the language, the recent past, and the regional context. People who have run projects on the ground, from Andrew Wilder and Antony Fitzherbert to Michael Semple and Martine van Biljert, have a much more detailed sense of the reality of international assistance in Afghanistan. Generals and ambassadors and development directors know far more about military tactics, practical diplomacy, and development theory. There are, most importantly, thirty million Afghans who intuitively understand far more about Afghanistan than any foreigner. And, as the British pointed out gleefully, I had traveled only in the north and center of Afghanistan—I had been to Helmand only once.
Nevertheless, I was confident that I was right. I tried to explain that this was not based on any special insights about Afghanistan, but instead on a sense of ourselves: the international community. I felt I had learned in the Balkans and particularly in Iraq that we—the foreign government organizations and their partners—know much less and can do much less than we pretend. I knew the international community underestimated the reality of Afghan rural life: they did not grasp just how poor, fragile, and traumatized Afghanistan was; just how conservative and resistant to foreigners, villages could be. Our institutions were too inherently optimistic, too ad hoc, too isolated from the concerns and realities of Afghan life, too caught up in metaphysical abstractions of “governance” and “the rule of law” ever to succeed—or to notice that we were not succeeding.
Rory needs to write in some detail about his preferred alternative to direct occupation in Afghanistan, “light long-term footprint.” In the past he has talked about “containment.”
Could the US relationship based on complex cooperation and use of force with Muqtada Sadr’s militia be a template for the alternative. But the latter, unlike the Taliban are not in the vanguard of the resistance to the US in Iraq, and are secondary to more senior ayatollahs in the social and religious hierarchy.
China may be developing into a world player in the near future but it is not going to be a dominating power or a “hegemon” like the US of today or the GB of yesterday. This is because as a continental nation (as opposed to an island nation like GB or Japan) with a long history of both good and bad times the people have settled into a set of values unlike that of the western nations. For a western scholar to think that China will behave like the US today is because few makes any attempt to understand the language and even less so to study Chinese history and culture.
China had a world class navy in the Ming dynasty long before GB ruled the waves. Even the all powerful emperor at that time found that effort not sustainable. China learned the lesson well after the emperor grounded all war ships and banned all adventure overseas.
China also learned that the many occurrences of bad times in its history were with a weak central government. Starvation and deaths were rampant at those sorry days. Thus it is the ingrained human values in Chinese culture to have sufficient food, clothing and lodging for all. This is fundamental and all else are secondary.
China has also learned that human nature as it is, the western election tools did not bring in democratic or even good government as the losers in the election would do everything in their power to bring down the government regardless of the urgent need to achieve those fundamental human values. Good governance (as opposed to good government) may be an ideal like communism that is impossible to achieve.
China understood it could not be a world cop nor a charity to all nations. Its primary target is to meet the fundamental values for its people. Unlike Christian religion of a “god” making “people” look like Him, China believe in good leadership to achieve those fundamental values by exploring different components of political systems that suit itself more. It is still “work-in-progress”. Thus China is no “god” and in no position to tell other nations what system they must adopt for their own development now or in the future as it is no doubt different for different nations. The Mao’s era has long gone.
Could China be a “hegemon” in the same manner as the US of today? The chance is less than 0.1%. Could China lead the world? History has shown that it has done that in the past and may well do so again in some respect but not in the way many western nations feared.