I find this really depressing.
I think Biden was correct to withdraw from Afghanistan, and that the problems with the withdrawal itself were massively overblown. I also think the situation Spackerman is describing is horrifying and I would like to see the US release Afghani funds, as he calls for, but I agree with Charley that it's not a simple ask.
So what needs to happen? Executive order to unfreeze the financial assets, alteration of the Taliban's status as a terrorist org...? It's not completely clear from his piece what the real-world political options are. I think the moral issue is actually crystal clear, but I don't know if there's a way to get there. (Part of me thinks that if Biden's ratings are currently in the shitter, he should just take the hit, but I realize this isn't reasonable.)
The Korean neo-shamanic jam at the end is decent, although a little sedate for my tastes. Actually a lot sedate for my tastes.
Yeah, we shouldn't make life easier for the Taliban specifically but economic measures like those discussed do seem to redound on the populace much more than on them. With Russia we invented measures to make the personal lives of leadership harder, and they seemed to feel that keenly; we could do the same in this case.
Not to mention freezing the country out from the entire financial system is a lot more than just the US not trading with them. And seems likely to incentivize them to go back to anything that can get them cash. Uranium mining? (They don't need more incentive to rev opium production back up, I guess.)
Color me extremely skeptical that changed US policy would actually result in the poorest Afghans doing better. Especially when the means of helping is giving the governing Taliban access to cash. The onus is on Ackerman to show us instances of governments like the Taliban using cash to help hoi polloi rather than to line their own pockets.
I mean, do we suddenly believe in trickle-down economics when it comes to authoritarian governments?
The key quotes here:
The unspoken but unyielding logic at work here is that the pressure necessary to oust the Taliban is the suffering of the population. A layer deeper lies the presumption, distributed across both political parties as well as the Security State, that the U.S. has the right not only to change Afghanistan's government but to inflict such suffering as a legitimate means. That logic runs through a U.S. sanctions apparatus that inflicts tremendous harm on noncombatants but is somehow considered an alternative to war.
How many million Afghans is Washington prepared to starve and freeze to death to compel the downfall of the restored Taliban regime? How many million Afghan deaths will have been worth the hypothetical ouster of a regime that, the United States is fond of mentioning, threatens human rights? When a U.S. adversary aims a weapon at a population to compel a desired outcome, we refer to that as an atrocity. In some such cases, we refer to it as terrorism. When the U.S. does it, we refer to it as the Rules-Based International Order. In its Jan. 11 aid announcement, the administration had the audacity to boast, in a prospective declaration of blamelessness, "we remain the single largest donor of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan."
OK, maybe I should read the article. The excerpt I saw yesterday was specifically about unfreezing funds, but it sounds like there's a broader set of things.
I'm always so hesitant to weigh in on these things, but Ackerman kind of makes it sound like there's this one weird trick that would help a LOT. Is it really that simple?
4: I think the issue is partly that the sanctions are broad enough that any kind of economic activity (including aid) is either firmly banned or at least has a huge legal risk associated with it. Possibly also that the Taliban may take intermediate custody of even aid they've agreed is earmarked, or could be presumed likely to take a cut.
From a Washington Post article Ackerman links: "The Treasury Department issued licenses that eased sanctions to allow money flows for emergency food, medicine and shelter, and the transfer of cash remittances to non-sanctioned individuals in Afghanistan." Implies sending money to anyone at all in Afghanistan is illegal without those licenses, which means any kind of trading.
This is where I get into trouble because finance confuses me. But boy do I not see an argument for continuing to freeze Afghanistan's currency reserves. Whatever you say about the current government of Afghanistan, they are the current government of Afghanistan. Who with a better right to those currency reserves do we have them frozen on behalf of? Are we just holding onto them until the operation of history tosses up an Afghan government we approve of?
Yeah, the WaPo article is good. Quotes due to paywall:
The Biden administration says that releasing the money is far more complicated than it appears, even if the administration wanted to, because of existing sanctions on the Taliban as an organization and on individual militants.
For the moment, officials said, it is legally impossible. All of Afghanistan's U.S. reserves are the subject of litigation by victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks in this country and other terror victims who have won monetary judgments against the Taliban. While the money previously was off limits as property of the non-Taliban Afghan government, the equation changed when the Taliban itself became the government, the victims have argued since.
A federal court has attached the money. A hearing on the matter that had been scheduled for Dec. 3 was postponed until late January at the Justice Department's request.
I have two competing instincts here.
The first one is that this is what Pakistan wanted, so they should fix it. The whole point of withdrawal is that Afghanistan isn't the US's business.
The second one is that the rules around sponsors of terror need some kind of exceptions for official governments. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is obviously a sponsor of terrorism and has been for decades, but they get an exception because they're rich. I see no particular reason to treat the Taliban differently than the government of Saudi Arabia. But of course this is a non-starter because of Iran. (Which, as a side point, I'm more opposed to Iranian sanctions than Afghan ones.)
Spackerman seems to think that the US is purposefully doing this to punish Afghanistan, but that's not my read at all. There are already-existing laws and rules around terrorist groups, and those rules are just being followed. It's not that we're taking new efforts to try to destabilize Afghanistan. We'd have to change those rules, and I don't see a practical way to do that given the disfunction of the US government. Something like delisting the Taliban as a terrorist group has to be done in a bipartisan fashion, because it's obviously unpopular with voters. Which I guess is all what this comes down to, it's increasingly difficult for elites in government to take actions that are clearly opposed by voters, and that's not something you can blame on Biden it's just baked into 21st century democracy. Biden could maybe cause less starving this winter, but it would just mean more starving in a couple years when the government changes.
From what I understand:
1. AFG's population has nearly doubled in the 20 years we've been running the place
2. and they basically have no economy now, and didn't when we invaded, besides opium
I think aid payments constituted half their GDP some years back?
We have an obligation to prop up the population short-term, but I can't see how it's reasonable for us to subsidize a government that will abuse its population and breed enemies of our nation. But then, at this point, I don't want my taxes going to Red states, and that's not going to happen either.
11 We don't designate Saudia a sponsor and then ignore it -- we get around the problem by not designating them. Agreed, there's no way that could politically fly with the Taliban.
9 Do we actually recognize the current government of Afghanistan? If not, that provides Biden with a legally unique opening, because -- I say (but couldn't get the DC Circuit to reach the issue) -- recognition is a purely executive act, and can be beyond the authority of Congress to revise/regulate. He can actually make a deal, I think, if he wants to.
10 As folks know, I had some collateral involvement with suits against sponsors of terrorism, and the whole thing is pretty wild. Armchair attorneys general -- really, having a private DNI and SOS -- is a whacky way to do foreign policy, and it has always been clear that this would create all sorts of problems for the actual government. The usual thought here is that you'd have all these outstanding judgments, then you'd have a normalization, and it would have to all get settled as part of that. (You can look up the litigation following the normalization with China on that (eg Shanghai Power Co. v. US, 4 Cl. Ct. 237 (1983), or my case arising from the settlement of "small claims" against Iran, in which we unsuccessfully invoked the claims against France arising in the first Adams administration, among other historical precedents.) Here, it's kind of the reverse. People were getting judgments they couldn't enforce against our client government in Afghanistan, and now maybe they can have a land rush trying to seize any Afghan money they can find.
4 I'm with you on that. I would prioritize removing roadblocks to aid before just putting money in Taliban pockets, but there is surely a question about the US role in hosting the deposit of foreign government funds -- it's one thing to control our own funding for Afghanistan, but if we're not going to act like a neutral depository, maybe we should send the money to Switzerland or something.
Personally, I'd rather drop the exemption for Saudi Arabia.
How many million Afghans is Washington prepared to starve and freeze to death to compel the downfall of the restored Taliban regime?
Ackerman is directly accusing the Biden administration of genocide. The only reason I can think of for not using the word itself is that it has a bit of a hyperbolic sound to it.
But Ackerman doesn't at all back up his assertion that this situation is about regime change. He even acknowledges that this is an "unspoken" motive.
I'm glad Biden seems to be facilitating aid -- something that I don't think would be happening if he wanted to starve the country into overthrowing the government.
I feel like when a monstrous result comes from lots of individual laws/rules adding up to way more than intended and difficult to unwind for structural reasons, you still need to hold leaders accountable for it. Similar to corporations that give all involved individuals plausible deniability.
We lost the war so its only fair we give the money back
Which, as a side point, I'm more opposed to Iranian sanctions than Afghan ones
I wouldn't say I'm more opposed, but Iranian sanctions have run their course and its pretty unconscionable for us to continue working to impoverish them after it was America that slithered away from the nuclear deal in bad faith.
I'd like to see Pakistan stepping up a bit. "They're our boys," remember.
There are more deserving targets for US aid, surely, and ones that would not entail funding this kind of horror.
would not entail funding this kind of horror.
What kind of horror, specifically? As far as I can tell, all the massacres and reprisals that were presented as inevitable when the Taliban took control of the country have not actually borne out, and all the Americans that Joe Biden allegedly left behind have been free to come and go as they please.
25% of that aid will reach the people who need it. The rest will go to pay the salaries of militiamen, or into bank accounts in Dubai.
Meanwhile Tonga could do with the help.
There seems to me to be a sharp distinction between aid, and funds that we currently agree belong to the Afghan government but we're holding frozen because the Taliban are terrorist. I can see arguments that aid is misguided, and I don't know enough myself to be clear.
But freezing their currency reserves so they can't trade seems in a completely different category.
But freezing their currency reserves so they can't trade seems in a completely different category.
I don't know anything about these issues, but the quotes in 10 make me think that this isn't the first time that US courts have ordered US institutions to hold money from a separate sovereign nation based on US law.
(I'm not arguing that the situations are analogous, it just reminded me of a story which seemed remarkable at the time.
Here's the problem facing the US courts. Everybody agrees - even Argentina is happy to agree to this - that Argentina owes Elliott Associates lots of money. Everybody agrees that Argentina has a contractual obligation, under New York law, to pay lots of money, to Elliott, right now if not sooner. But of course Argentina has made no such payment. And so it's very easy for Elliott to go to a New York judge (in this case, Thomas Griesa), and get that judge to hand down a judgment telling Argentina in no uncertain terms that it owes Elliott lots of money. And Argentina will in turn treat that judgment with exactly the same respect it gives to the original bond contract. In fact, for tactical reasons, Elliott has chosen not to become a judgment creditor: if it just had a court judgment, and not a bond contract, then it would find it much harder to argue arcane legal points about various bits of legal boilerplate in the contract.
...
More broadly, this ruling is just one more step towards a world where the old verities about sovereign risk simply don't hold any more. It used to be that sovereigns were sovereign: that was bad news if they unilaterally decided to default on you, but other than that it was pretty good news. Now, however, they're at the mercy not only of unelected technocrats at places like the IMF or the ECB; they're also at the mercy of unelected judges in New York. Sovereigns have less freedom of movement now than they have done in a very long time, and we're only beginning to grok the implications of those constraints.
That judgement lead to
The deal, which must be approved by Argentina's Congress, calls for the government to pay $4.653 billion to four of the so-called holdout U.S. hedge funds. That equals about 75 percent of what they claimed they were owed.
...
[E]verything changed after the November election of President Mauricio Macri, who vowed to end the dispute during his campaign.
"The current administration realized that Argentina cannot be shut down from the international markets, so from the beginning they said, 'We're going to fix this problem,' and that's what they're doing," said Diego Ferro, co-chief investment officer at Greylock Capital Management, in an interview with NPR.
Wow, that's a hell of a business model. Buy up defaulted sovereign debt for pennies on the dollar, sue the sovereign in US courts and BAM, your hedge fund gets to extract several billion dollars from a struggling economy.
That's not the best or best-known comparison - this one should be closer: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/pcha/PlunderRestitution.html/html/StaffChapter3.html and, incidentally, shows that Salmon's hyperbole about how this is a totally new world for sovereign risk is simply not historically informed. In the 19th and early 20th century sovereign debt repayments were sometimes enforced by the threat of invasion.
This article https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-afghan-central-bank-drained-dollar-stockpile-before-kabul-fell-2021-09-29/gives some more background on what really happened to the DAB foreign currency reserves.
"What kind of horror, specifically? As far as I can tell, all the massacres and reprisals that were presented as inevitable when the Taliban took control of the country have not actually borne out,"
Hey,Spike, read a newspaper.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/24/afghanistan-taliban-enforcer-says-amputations-will-resume
"What kind of horror, specifically? As far as I can tell, all the massacres and reprisals that were presented as inevitable when the Taliban took control of the country have not actually borne out,"
Hey, Spike, read a newspaper.
"What kind of horror, specifically? As far as I can tell, all the massacres and reprisals that were presented as inevitable when the Taliban took control of the country have not actually borne out,"
Hey, Spike, read a newspaper.
The situation in AFG is a bad one. Maybe a way to think about it is that the Taliban have kidnapped the population and are holding them hostage. We want the hostages to survive, so we want to send in food, drink, other necessaries of life. But those are going to go to the kidnapper, too, and they'll use those necessaries to impose a Stockholm-syndrome-like conversion on some/many of the hostages, in addition to harming other hostages. So how do we ensure that we maximize the welfare of the hostages, while minimizing the harm the kidnappers can do ? I sure don't have an answer, but just giving the Taliban resources and shipments of food, etc, doesn't seem like an obvious good path.
And all of that is without considering our own national interest in not subsidizing the creation of more enemies of our nation.
And last, y'know, the Saudis and Pakistanis also created this state of affairs: they should be the ones to spend money to help the Afghan people. And the Saudis are rich enough to afford it. It's difficult for me to see how we *uniquely* are responsible for this state of affairs. So again, it's as if the kidnappers were trained by the local Mafia, and somehow, we're not supposed to go after them for that training. And we can't even impound the bank accounts of the Mafia and use that as ransom money.
Maybe a way to think about it is that the Taliban have kidnapped the population and are holding them hostage.
Maybe a way to think about it is that the Taliban have the support of certainly a very large part of the population and possibly even an outright majority. I would be pretty certain that they have a solid majority of Pashtuns behind them. They are not a foreign occupier. They'll never hold an election, but if they did, do you really think a majority of people would want Ashraf Ghani and his cabal of rapists and thieves back? Shit, the Taliban probably have a better approval rating than Joe Biden right now.
Saudi sent its first aid to Afghanistan last month. Sixty-five tonnes of food. That was it.
ajay: fair cop, I've read that survey conducted by that organization that does them every year for the last decade-and-change, and the percentage of Afghans who think the burqa/niqab is the right dress for women in public was shockingly high. I should have said something like "kidnapped some part of the population". Also: 64 tons, eh? Gosh those Wahhabis are so great.
Ashraf Ghani is thanked in the acknowledgments to Europe and the People without History. (He was a prominent academic before he went back to Afghanistan and got into politics.) This is hilarious in a bunch of different ways.
"Particularly an enemy with as few redeeming attributes as the Taliban. "
The people being punished will be the Afghans who we were supposedly trying to help. Nire collective guilt. Afghaniustan was a sink for loose American money for 20 years, and no it isn't, so screw them, right? Ukraine here we come.
" I see no particular reason to treat the Taliban differently than the government of Saudi Arabia."
I REALLY don't belong here.
We made a desert and called it a leartning experience, though we didn't learn anything.
"Maybe a way to think about it is that the Taliban have the support of certainly a very large part of the population and possibly even an outright majority. "
Exterminate the brutes.
Rarely is the question asked: is our children learnting?
Come on, Emerson, limit yourself to one flounce a week. More just looks silly.
I'm kind of shocked that Emerson would parrot, even for rhetorical purposes, the obvious fiction that we were ever actually trying to help Afghans. We went there to avenge 9/11 and degrade Afghanistan as a venue for planning attacks of that kind. We stayed so long because of the needs of US domestic politics, relating not to the Afghans, but to our manliness and, marginally, our safety. We finally get an executive willing to say there's no more manliness or safety to be had, so we leave.
That some Afghans might have gotten helped by our policy was a side effect. And likely outnumbered by the Afghans were very definitely neither tried to help nor actually helped.
Emerson probably thinks it was all about the Rothschilds wanting to build a pipeline. That's about as deep as his understanding goes. (He slanders me, I'll slander him.)
Ajay, I can't figure out where you're coming from here. You're disgusted that stupid, naive people want to forestall an imminent, huge humanitarian catastrophe in a population with a pretty high percentage of children? It's one thing to think that pragmatically Afghanistan should get the harshest possible treatment because that will save lives (?) in the long run, but I don't get the dripping scorn and contempt for the humanitarian concern. I have no wish to flounce, but I don't feel great about engaging on these terms. If you can clarify where your outrage is and isn't directed here, maybe the conversation can be more productive. I realize this comment is a total waste of time but that's my brand it seems
I'm just opposed to people leaving here because, regardless of views, we're all united in being less evil than Facebook.
Please just ignore the phrase "It's one thing to think that pragmatically Afghanistan should get the harshest possible treatment because that will save lives (?) in the long run". I'm sure it's not an accurate statement of your views or anyone's views. I do not believe that this is what you think. I regret writing it. The rest stands.
Mainly I am annoyed that Emerson has turned up to accuse me of genocidal tendencies.
Unlike Spike, I believe that the Taliban are actually not very nice people, and are doing bad things to innocent people again.
And I am very unconvinced that handing a large sum of money to the Taliban will do much to improve the lives of Afghan children, or indeed Afghan adults. I think it will allow them to pay more soldiers to do more bad things. I think it will be a net negative for the people of Afghanistan and for the world.
It is an idea underpinned generally by worthy sentiments, but I think it is misguided, because similar efforts in the past have also been shown to be misguided and counterproductive.
I have no scorn whatever for people who just want to do something to alleviate human suffering in Afghanistan, but I dont think this is it. This is something the Taliban very much wants to happen, but I do not believe that the welfare of the Afghan people is their top priority.
I have no scorn whatever for people who just want to do something to alleviate human suffering in Afghanistan, but I dont think this is it. This is something the Taliban very much wants to happen, but I do not believe that the welfare of the Afghan people is their top priority.
There's an asymmetry in the relative risks, however.
If you're correct that releasing the money would just strengthen the Taliban and fail to solve the humanitarian crisis, that would be bad.
If Ackerman is correct that releasing the money will prevent 22+ million people from dying of hunger and cold, that seems much, much worse.
I don't pretend to have enough information to actually make that decision, but that's the argument for releasing the money even if there's a chance that it just helps the Taliban.
46/47: Thanks. And Emerson et al, it could be so much worse: no one has so much as mentioned blockchain yet.
You can't fight terrorism by stooping to their level.
Ajay @ 46: "I am very unconvinced that handing a large sum of money to the Taliban will do much to improve the lives of Afghan children, or indeed Afghan adults."
Imagine that we made the following offer to the Taliban: we will send this money, but only if our administrators do all the work, do all the disbursing of aid, and are given a free hand to do so. And you will publicly and before the international community undertake in a sworn manner, to support them and hinder them in any way, nor to hinder anybody that these administrators give aid to. And if you abrogate these undertakings, then we will leave and stop the money and aid.
Does anybody think that the Taliban would either agree to this, or, having agreed, actually abide by these conditions?
Their actions these last N months speak for themselves.
To the extent Spackerman is right, he's *still* arguing that we must pay off the kidnappers to keep the hostages from dying.
I mean, we know from Obamacare that a good number of American states won't take that kind of deal.
Does anybody think that the Taliban would either agree to this, or, having agreed, actually abide by these conditions?
Are we going to send in a few troops and military contractors to make sure "our administrators" are protected? I bet that will go over well.
Ah, Spike! Read any newspapers yet? Here's a cracker:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/20/taliban-arrest-afghan-womens-rights-activist-witness-says
Some of them are just vanishing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-60091003
Spike standing at Kabul airport addressing the fleeing crowds : "Go home! You're just being silly! You have nothing to fear from the Taliban! I know far more about this situation than you do!"
Spike @ 54: Uh, no, why would those be necessary. If the Taliban are serious and are dealing in good faith, then they will stand guaranty for the safety of our administrators, and the faithful execution of the agreements they sign.
I agree that the link between how the Afghan governments funds are being handled and wishes some sort of rump faction in the US defense establishment that is still mad at Biden, and wants to kill his policy,* was underdeveloped.
Aid ought to be ramped up, and done, to the extent possible, through channels that are going to be harder for the Taliban to control.
As for whether we can hold the money hostage waiting for a treaty that has some sort of graduated lifting of sanctions, I think (a) time is not on the side of a bunch of Afghans and (b) I don't know whether that is consistent with the terms of the deal that got the Afghan money under our control in the first place. If under the law they are entitled to their money back, the facts that they'll not use it wisely, and are sure to use some of it really unwisely have to be dealt with on their own terms.
* The Republican lean of a bunch of white people in rural-ish states is a bad thing. What's really bad, though, is Republican lean is significant portions of the federal bureaucracy, particularly but not exclusively defense. When you have people in charge of implementing policy who not only disagree with the policy, but want the policy to fail, and know that they and their partisans will be rewarded for that failure, guess what happens?
58.last: to be honest, it isn't terribly obvious right now that the US defence bureaucracy is capable of making any policy succeed, regardless of whether they want it to or not.
Presumably this is because the US sacks generals for getting bad press, but not for incompetence.
59: This reminds me of something else I've wondered. Isn't the US Navy broken? It has serious operational problems, and serious problems in planning for the future. Hasn't anyone noticed? Isn't there anyone in DC who thinks "Maybe we should have a functioning navy?"
At this point I wonder if the worst-case scenario happens and the US Navy ends up in between a Chinese invasion fleet and Taiwan, we'd find the entire navy sunk in 24 hours and people on TV wringing their hands saying "Who could have seen this coming?"
59 One way they can succeed is by setting out to tank the President's policy. *That* they can do.
I'm pretty far away from this sort of thing, but to an uninformed outsider, the Navy looks like a self-perpetuating legacy machine, no more consequential, outside its ranks, than Ivy League crew or maybe Big Ten football is the fairer comparison. I suppose if you want to bomb some place, it's convenient to use carrier based aircraft. Although, someone who knows shit could probably convince me that ground based aircraft are every bit as effective.
It's hard to imagine some kind of Midway like showdown.
I've heard many times from "people who know" that the Air Force is a disaster, too. I guess that leaves the Army and the Marines as possibly functional.
Yes, with people like Charles Flynn (brother of Mike) in charge of the Army in the Pacific, I feel very secure.
Did i make up that Coast Guard is also the name of some soap or deodorant?
Are you thinking of Right Guard? Conflated with Coast soap?
No, no, you call the Right Guard when the Coast is invaded.
I'm quite familiar with the disfunction of the US military (particularly the Navy and the Air Force) but I'm curious to know how other militaries compare. My friends working on Canadian Defence don't seem particularly impressed either.
Actually, this is probably also the right crowd to answer a silly question for me. I've been reading a few mystery series set around and just after WWI (Inspector Rutledge, Bess Crawford, Maisie Dobbs, Verity Kent), and so I've been thinking about German trenches. As portrayed in fiction, the trenches were far better designed, more habitable, and safer. It also sounds like the German generals were far more competent than most of the British. Why didn't the Germans win, at least prior to the Americans showing up?
(I'm almost embarrassed to ask something so basic, especially here, but I learned virtually nothing about WWI in school, and the only aspects of it that I've taught have concerned the diplomatic consequences. I have, however, shown students the Black Adder clip about how it started.)
Well, it takes more than generals to win a war. Food and industrial production are a big deal too.
I recall learning in Verdun that while French soldiers were rotated in and out, and went home on leave, the German soldiers were there for the whole miserable duration. This could well be so poorly stated as to constitute fiction.
I mean Germany very nearly did win, right? Some huge portion of the French troops mutinied and the allies only just barely held on until the American reinforcements were ready. If Germans had had better intelligence about the French mutinies they could probably have won. On the flip side, didn't Germany's loss have mostly to do with the blockade and nothing on the ground at all?
The German army was in complete, uncontrolled retreat when they surrendered and it would have been so much better for later history if the Allies had kept fighting until that was very obvious to the Germans.
Sorry, that answer was too short, I didn't mean to imply that they weren't routed in the end, but rather that this wasn't because the allies had better trenches or strategy, but rather because Germany was unable to keep their troops adequately supplied due to the huge impact of the blockade both on agricultural and industrial production.
They weren't able to keep enough troops alive and in fighting condition because they didn't have enough people. They put everything they had into a spring offensive, which took a ton of ground. But it cost them too many of their best men, took them out of their well-prepared positions that were easy to defend, and meant that they had to supply across a railroad-less waste they created when attacking.
That is, the stalemate was likely to continue until either the allies ran out of soldiers or the Germans ran out of food. The former very nearly happened, but once US troops arrived it was no longer a possibility, and so eventually the latter happened first.
The Germans ran out of soldiers before they ran out of food. They knew they would lose a stalemate as you say, so they attacked first while they had a chance. They ran out of troops.
Not exactly relatedly, I've found it very interesting to travel to places which are both geographically unique and historically important. Particularly, The Bosporus and Scapa Flow were just really striking to see in person.
I also was on a biking vacation in Flanders, and had a long day of biking that was almost entirely flat. At one point towards the end of the day we hit the first real hill we'd seen. Barely a hill by American standards, but if you're an amateur biker on a bike not intended for hills you really notice even a minor hill. When we finally got to the top of the hill we stopped for a breather to enjoy the view from the tiny town on the crest of the hill. And then noticed a sign with the town name reading Passendale.
Was that the one where the used all the mines?
I'll agree Moby has the better of this point, but at any rate I think we're more in agreement than not: better or worse conditions in the trenches and better or worse generals just isn't nearly as important as running out of troops and resources. (Soldiers and resources aren't entirely separable anyway, one big reason Germany was having huge food shortages was that they'd put too many farmers into the army.)
"As portrayed in fiction, the trenches were far better designed, more habitable, and safer. It also sounds like the German generals were far more competent than most of the British. Why didn't the Germans win, at least prior to the Americans showing up?"
The first part is true, though not entirely - the Germans dug in deeper and used more concrete.
The second is not - by 1918 the German army was being out fought at every level by the British and Commonwealth armies and (to a lesser extent) by the French, and the Americans, after taking some terrible and unnecessary losses, were learning fast. The spring offensives outrun their own logistics - yes, a bit, but they also ran into highly competent opposition who defeated them in the field.
They then spent a great deal of time and effort persuading themselves and everyone else (with, as we can see above, some success) that they had not, in fact, been out fought, but had been starved out, or outnumbered, or betrayed by Socialists, or stabbed in the back by Jews or something.
They did the same after the next war they lost.
Resources were always less available to the Germans than their adversaries and they like to pretend that's some kind of built-in constraint they need to work against as opposed to the result of their policy choices.
Moby: to add to what you wrote, Adam Tooze ran a seminar on The Prussian Way Of War a while back, in which he basically argued that the historical record shows that the Prussians (and by inheritance, the Germans) throughout the 19th century and thru WWII only knew one way of war: launch a shock-and-awe kinetic campaign to roll over the enemy and get a quick victory. Every time, every time that didn't work, they got bogged-down and, by lack of the actual national resources for a long campaign of attrition, were defeated. In Wages of Destruction he makes the pretty clear argument that that's is *explicitly* what Hitler did in WWII, and that is precisely why it didn't matter what tactics or strategy they tried: their "national grand strategy" was doomed.
Which, bringing this back to WWI, can be recast as "Germany was literally starving to death, there was no way they were gonna win WWI."
83: see also "Russia is encircled by its enemies".
I should have added: Or maybe one might say:
Amateurs talk tactics.
Professionals talk logistics.
Real professionals talk "state capacity."[1]
[1] As in "the capacity of a state to choose and then effectively invest (including money, reordering society, etc) in a disciplined manner in some long-term goal."
It's also the case that the blockade's success in World War I was a result of a German political and military failure. They built a navy to try to starve the British and did not succeed, but in the attempt they managed to make it politically impossible for any kind of international reaction to constrain the Allied blockade. After Russia fell, they tried and failed to get Poland, Ukraine, etc. to provide enough grain to feed Germany, but it turns out that "you be good serfs and we'll leave you a crust" can leave you less popular with the locals than the Russians are.
Moby: Yes, another example of the Prussian failure at "Grand National Strategy". Though (to bring this back to AFG) we shouldn't scoff too hard: As Tomas Ricks observed about the Iraq War, our "Grand National Strategy" has been a failure for a long time, arguably since Vietnam. For those who of that mind, Edward Luttwak has a book _The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire_. [I don't know the man's politics, and have some vague memory that they might not be the most salubrious, but the book itself was *fascinating*]
There's also "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire," which is a good read. His best is "Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook."
DaveLMA: Oy, I'd forgotten that last one. I should give it a read, b/c hey, *so topical*.
"As Tomas Ricks observed about the Iraq War, our "Grand National Strategy" has been a failure for a long time, arguably since Vietnam"
Looking back at the last 50 years, it's very difficult indeed to argue that this was a period in which the US experienced sustained strategic failure. Its main competitor is now reduced to trying to take back it's own agricultural heartland. Its new main competitor is locked away behind a ring of mountains, deserts and naval alliances. All the other major powers are US allies - all of them.
I agree with this, and it is certainly better to be lucky than good.
But I've never thought that radical Islam was an existential threat to the US, as many of the people who write that sort of thing did/do. Our effort to create a pro-Israel satellite state in Iraq, leading to inevitable victory over Iran, hasn't exactly worked out. Our ability to boss around third world countries -- this is a central piece of America being Great Again, just as its domestic equivalent is -- is somehow just not happening. That can only be because of a stab in the back, since otherwise all the plans would have worked.
Ajay: yes, our main cold war adversary was defeated and boy howdy, we've been on a roll ever since, haven't we?
But seriously, in the process of that "victory" we created a new set of adversaries -- and those adversaries kicked our asses, didn't they? More importantly, in every kinetic war we've fought including Vietnam, we lost, except for Desert Storm, which arguably created bin Laden and the enormous blowback that has haunted us ever since -- so again, wow, what a victory. Vietnam is a clear case: we simply lost that war, simple as that. Ricks' real argument is with the Afghan and Iraq wars. He argues that our generals and politicians were simply unable to formulate a plan to actually achieve our national strategic goals. Now, the reason for that is that no such plan existed, sure.
All our military adventurism, our propping dictators in places like Iraq (remember, he was our man before he was our bogeyman) or Iran (the Shah), it's been a massive generational failure. And our generals have had two choices: (1) resign in protest at the stupidity of it, or (2) say "yes sir, how high!". And then, when they *fail* (which they must, because these goals are unachievable) they're *rewarded* instead of being cashiered. Indeed, Ricks started on the path to this book by looking at the history of generals getting cashiered. Apparently it was a regular occurrence thru WWII, but in Vietnam and after, a rarer-and-rarer occurrence. Similarly, the incidence of generals actually suffering combat wounds or death dropped like a stone after WWII. His point is that our military leadership is co-opted and corrupted by our political leadership, and together they can't actually achieve our national goals.
Ajay: "All the other major powers are US allies - all of them."
Uh, China? And I don't think we can write off transnational Salafist irregular militias just yet.
China is what Ajay meant by "New main competitor", surely.
97: yes - should have made that clearer.
And, bloody hell, Chetan, "transnational Salafist irregular militias" are not a major power and they are never going to be. Even the states they run are pathetically weak. Afghanistan is a disaster area. Saudi Arabia (run by a transnational Salafist militia since 1926) is an underpopulated protectorate.
"Grand national strategy" (as distinct from "Grand National strategy" which is basically "save a bit for the final furlong and don't fall off going over the jumps") is bigger than what happens in a single campaign or even in a single war. The classic description of the levels of warfare goes something like this:
Technical: I'm firing a gun at an oncoming German tank, which will, depending on various things like velocity and armour, either blow up or not blow up. This takes seconds.
Tactical: I'm doing this as part of a battle in which my battalion is trying to defend this village in France. This will take the next couple of days.
Operational: The point of holding this village is to protect the flank of an army which is now marching south and east in order to encircle the Germans and defeat them. This will take about two weeks.
Strategic: the point of this campaign is to defeat the German army and drive it out of France. This will take four months.
Grand strategic: Britain is a small island with a small population heavily dependent on maritime imports and exports. Therefore it cannot allow the Channel coast of Europe to be dominated by a single hostile power, as this would endanger our sea trade and place us at risk of invasion. This has been the case for several centuries.
Failing to get much above the operational level is what doomed Germany in two world wars, and, I would argue, failing to distinguish strategy from grand strategy is the problem with 94 and 95.
The other failing of 94 and 95 is also very Prussian - a failure to realise that military action is only one of many ways to achieve the aims of your grand strategy.
The US has of course Never Lost A War, but even aside from that it's pretty wild to try to argue that US grand strategy over the past 50 years has been a failure. Things aren't ideal right now in lots of ways, but c'mon, look around. We're still the most powerful country in the world along many dimensions. All of the wars that we Totally Haven't Lost since WWII have been against countries so much smaller and poorer than us that it hasn't made any meaningful difference at all to the lives of the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Nobody's speaking Vietnamese in Omaha. (I mean, some people are, but only because we relocated them there from Vietnam after we Totally Didn't Lose that war.)
And even Vietnam itself is now working fairly well with the US and other countries in the area to counter China. Pretty good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Vietnam_relations#Military
One way to look at it: the Germans abandoned an earlier plan to win by battering through the French eastern fortresses with a huge concentration of big guns because the technology needed to crack the concrete (itself new technology) got too expensive, but building a bigger army to outflank them was relatively cheap, and also that was the kind of thing the officer corps knew how to do well, both training it and doing the staffwork needed to design such a campaign. When it didn't work out everyone turned to technology - concrete, wire, and machine guns for the Germans, building a linear fortress from Switzerland to the sea.
Now the roles are flipped. The Allied side is thrashing around looking for some way to either smash through it or go around it while the Germans sit there and slaughter them. It takes the Allies three years to develop the mobility technology - tanks, armoured cars, aviation, but also radio, logistics based on trucks rather than rail to the railhead and then horses, and a lot of sapper shit like plastic explosives, air compressors, and tarmac roadbuilding* - to overcome the German counter-mobility technology. In the autumn of 1918 this stuff gets rolled out and it's all over - the Hundred Days Offensive just keeps rolling forwards until it cuts the German railway network up.
*the UK's roads get tarmacked almost completely within 10 years of the end of the war, right into tiny hamlets, a massive social change nobody knows about.
It's also the case that the blockade's success in World War I was a result of a German political and military failure. They built a navy to try to starve the British and did not succeed, but in the attempt they managed to make it politically impossible for any kind of international reaction to constrain the Allied blockade.
Also true, though I must say that no one is quite sure exactly why Germany did build its navy (a navy explicitly intended to cut off British maritime trade would probably have looked very different from the actual German Navy), and it is disturbingly plausible that the real answer is "The Kaiser was basically a toddler given supreme executive power, and he happened to think that battleships looked really cool".
We know all about the tarmacking, thank you: it wrecked our delicate ecology with horrible gritty runoff after every rainstorm.
104: also the margin on building them was really something. two to three newbuildings a year really keeps the business ticking over.
106: Typical driveby mayfly troll. Here today, gone tomorrow...
101: That's more of a Lincoln thing.
89: "...it turns out that 'you be good serfs and we'll leave you a crust' can leave you less popular with the locals than the Russians are."
Amazingly, thirty years later, even after the Russians had perpetrated a genocidal famine in those regions, a different batch of invading Germans found tactics that still made them less popular with the locals than the Russians were.
Yes. I left that as an exercise for the reader.
I don't know why the Vietnamese population of Nebraska is in Lincoln and not Omaha. I guess because of some resettlement problem in the past.
Interesting. It's still striking to me as an American how much of Scotland is one-track tarmac that would be two-track gravel or dirt in the US.
Well, a lot of places have only one track because most of the people who drive in never drive out again.
And, yes, I've thought the same thing in reverse. In Scotland if you find yourself driving on an unmetalled road, it is either a forestry track (so, used by large lorries to haul timber) or it's the drive up to a farmhouse or something. The idea of an unmetalled road that actually leads somewhere is a bit disturbing.
The Midwest is full of gravel roads because it's a grid with roads every mile even when the population density is ten people per square mile.
I wonder if that's literally an "invented here" effect. Not that I know anything about the details, but there was a Mr. MacAdam who it's all named after -- was there a very successful first-mover paving firm located in Scotland?
It's also a difference in vehicles, though the causality there probably goes both directions. Rural US is full of huge pickup trucks, and rural Scotland small cars. American vehicles wouldn't fit on the narrow Scottish roads, and Scottish vehicles aren't built to go "off-road."
Also TIL that use of the word metal.
118: what McAdam invented (one of the memorable McAnical Inventions of the period, which were all invented by Scotchmen and were forms of Progress and therefore a Bad Thing) would look, to modern eyes, like a gravel road. His innovation was just laying a layer of fairly small, uniform-sized gravel on top of the earth. What it replaced - which you see, now, virtually nowhere, certainly nowhere outside cities - was roads which were paved with slabs of stone, in several layers of various sizes. That's how the Romans built their roads, but it was expensive and slow, and also required regular maintenance, otherwise when erosion tilted the slabs you had something that was even more difficult to get across than a dirt road.
Macadamised roads were great until you start getting motor vehicles, which are much faster and basically churn up the gravel in a way that feet and hooves and cartwheels don't.
Tarmac is "tar-bound macadamised" - a macadamised road with a layer of tar poured over it to keep everything in place when motor vehicles drive over it. That wasn't actually invented by McAdam but by a Welshman called Hooley, who patented the name.
Typical. No one ever gives a Welshman any credit.
Oddly I was recently reading about Roman roads, they had several types, one of which was just graveled. The main roads had several layers beginning with pounded earth, stones, gravel/rubble, and pavers.
Rural US is full of huge pickup trucks, and rural Scotland small cars. American vehicles wouldn't fit on the narrow Scottish roads, and Scottish vehicles aren't built to go "off-road."
I don't know about this bit, tbh. The narrowest Scottish road would still be wide enough to take a tractor, or a lorry, or even a bus - or, regrettably, an enormous campervan (RV). I can't say I've ever seen a public road in Scotland that I wouldn't be able to take a ludicrous pickup along. Even huge pickups have a wheelbase that isn't much wider or longer than that of a Transit van, and they get everywhere.
Probably that's technically correct that it would fit (certainly you're right about the insane rvs), but also Americans are not skilled drivers and would find it stressful and would rather have larger roads. (Not to mention that Americans are against taking turns and sharing.)
There's a one lane underpass on a semi-important two-way road in Pittsburgh. It seems to work but it scares me when I need to use it. Which is like twice in twenty years.
The Scottish speciality that worries me is not the single-track road - one knows where one is with that - but what you could call the lane-and-a-half road. This is a road that is just wide enough to allow two drivers unfamiliar with the road to pass in opposite directions very slowly while edging on to the verge, or to allow two local drivers to zoom past each other at a combined closing speed of 100mph. The interesting moments occur when you, a non-local driver, encounter a local coming in the other direction.
No one ever gives a Welshman any credit.
The Welshman's dishonest - he cheats when he can -
And little and dark, more like monkey than man,
He works underground with a lamp in his hat
And he sings far too loud, far too often and flat...
127: My strategy in that scenario is to come to a complete stop and assume that the local can deal with it.
The worst driving experience I had in Scotland was predictably in Skye with a tourist who didn't know how to reverse and just drove off the road (they were just past their turnout, I was well past mine, but they didn't understand how steering works in reverse). The second-worst was going out to Achmelvich Beach just as a wedding was getting out. Boy that was some fast local drivers coming right at me. I'm eternally grateful that we got to the car park just before the shuttle bus with the wedding party left.
ajay is so cancelled, along with both Swann and (especially) Flanders
The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.
also, the legendary drunken bus driver on Skye, who would interrupt his route to stop at the pub. This was maybe fifty years ago, when the whole island ran on Crawfords (unleaded) three star.
ajay:
1. we seem to have two major competitors (Russia and China) and notwithstanding that one of them is an economic and demographic basket-case, they were still able to make a decapitation strike against our government.
2. "salafist militias": as many, many people observed, bin Laden's success was not in taking and holding territory, but in turning us against ourselves and causing us to make error-after-error. Does anybody deny that we went into 2001 in a vastly superior hegemonic position than in 2020 ?
Our Grand Strategy in the GWOT was to construct a series of alliances in the Middle East: boy howdy we accomplished that, didn't we? And the allies we have, boy they're some real keepers aren't they? A few more victories like that and we'll be done for.
Some years ago, a friend of mine was on a bus (full) in Sheffield that was losing time due to bad traffic, and the driver was getting lip from some of passengers. Then he got to a stop and, because the bus was full, he announced "Passengers alighting only!" Some people in the queue started effing and blinding at him, so he climbed out of his cab, got off the bus, crossed the road into a pub opposite, AND NEVER CAME BACK. As my mate said, a class way to quit a job.
Blimey I'm learning a lot of new words today.
Ugh I just had to email a vendor in Ukraine and ask if they'll still be able to fill orders if Russia invades. I tried to be nice and say oh and we care about your safety too not just our business.
132.1 is wrong and I'm not really up for another rehash of the argument about how bin Laden totally meant to end up on the floor of a suburban house in Pakistan with his organisation smashed, most of his friends dead or in prison, and half his skull missing. You think that was his plan all along, fine.
But on 132.last, please read what I said above about what "grand national strategy" is.
To elaborate:
Our Grand Strategy in the GWOT was to construct a series of alliances in the Middle East: boy howdy we accomplished that, didn't we?
First, I don't actually think that was the US strategy (not grand strategy, please note). The US response employed a lot of alliances with Middle Eastern powers that already existed, in chief those with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent with the UAE, the UK* and with Egypt. And you can include Djibouti and Pakistan, if you count those as the Middle East.
The US did not respond by trying to construct more alliances. They could have done; there might have been a window for a rapprochement with Iran. Don't forget those spontaneous sympathy rallies in Teheran! But that wasn't what the US did.
*Yes, the UK. BIOT.
And the allies we have, boy they're some real keepers aren't they?
They aren't morally nice, but they're the right allies to have. What better ones are there in the ME, from a strategic point of view? Syria? Yemen? Lebanon?
137.last The US/KSA alliance gave us 9/11 and the GWOT.
British Indian Ocean Territory. Which has no native population since they were removed for the military bases.
138: still not sure that the US would be better off with an openly hostile Saudi Arabia, though.
Is there mystic significance in the difference between posts by "Ajay" and posts by "ajay"?
