What Else Was Supposed To Happen?

Earlier this week, the Taliban retook Kabul, negating a near twenty-year occupation in a little over 90 days. Naturally, Biden is facing intense criticism over this as we haven't had an embarrassment like this since the Fall of Saigon in 1975. So amidst all this embarrassment and humiliation I ask just a simple question:

What else was supposed to happen?

If your answer is an orderly retreat then what you need for that is a continued U.S. troop presence working alongside Afghan forces putting up a coordinated defense against the Taliban offensive. At the time of our withdrawal, we had 2500 troops in country. That all the major cities surrendered almost immediately shows that the Taliban laid the groundwork to accept them. Also, if you want an orderly surrender from an advancing enemy, you have to work that out with them beforehand. Tell me, what do you think would go over better: what's happening now, or Biden submitting a formal U.S. surrender asking the Taliban for terms for it to withdraw in an orderly fashion.

 

"But we should get people who helped us out of the country," I hear people say as if the last year of the government leaving its own citizens out in the cold wasn't indicative of anything. If the government is willing to watch over 600,000 of its own people die without lifting a finger, it isn't going prioritize poor people on the other side of the world either. Never mind the fact that getting people out of Afghanistan brings up the other question of where are they going to go. Tucker Carlson is already pushing the propaganda that bringing Afghan refugees here is a existential threat to the United States, so. This country isn't exactly fond of refugees, especially ones we created.It makes us look  bad, which we hate more than anything else.

 

If your answer is that we should've stayed until the job was done, then show me one time in world history, let alone our own, where one country under military occupation developed the political and social structures to exist under its own self-determination. Japan, West Germany, and South Korea are the only examples that come to mind but even then they don't readout apply here. Japan and West Germany didn't have coordinated armed resistance movements led by their deposed governments for the entirety of our occupation. South Korea doesn't apply either since most of its progress came after they overthrew the military dictatorship we installed to rule over them. 

But let's say that the whole nation building thing is possible, what does that look like? Seriously, how do you know the job is finished? Leaving out the Taliban, the Afghan national government is riddled with hilarious levels of corruption, leaving it lethally incapable of providing public services to its population. So if the mission was to create a government in our own image, we succeeded.

Or, maybe "staying until the job is done" means we stay until the Taliban is militarily defeated. What makes that complicated is that Pakistan gives the Taliban money and a place of refuge. So even if they lose battles in Afghanistan, the Taliban has a safe haven to go and regroup to which is exactly what they've been doing since we abandoned the war when we invaded Iraq. What then, is the plan for Pakistan? Do we invade it, sanction them, what? Keep in mind that Pakistan is also (ostensibly) one of our allies so anything we do there comes at the cost of making any agreements between the Taliban and Pakistani government even stronger which is why no president has done anything about the situation. 

So what we have is an enemy we can't afford to defeat on one side and a puppet government that's as self-sufficient as a ventriloquist dummy on the other. There can't be any negotiation between the two because for negotiations to work, it has to happen between equal participants. The Afghan national government never brought anything to the table because any legitimacy it had came from our military. Why would the Taliban honor any agreement in this situation? Why would they allow an enemy to hold onto territory and power when they could just take everything once we walked out the door?

Leaving aside all these questions, how is any of this surprising when for the last ten years we've told ourselves we had to stay in Afghanistan is because if we left, the Taliban would take over the country in less than a month. This was the message from both the Obama and Trump administrations so why is everyone acting like this is the first time we're hearing how what happened could happen. We don't have to live up to the stereotype of the ignorant American loudmouth every single time. 

What's happening in Afghanistan is happening because there was never any plan for what we were gonna do once we got there. We knew we were going to blow people up but aside from that, there was never a grand strategy from the Bush (or Obama, or Trump) administration defining what the goal of the war was or what victory even looked like. We've spent the last twenty years doing the equivalent of spinning our wheels while we tried to figure out what it was all those people were dying for. 

It's important to understand this because it tells us that we lost Afghanistan decades ago. The Taliban taking control of the country was inevitable as far back as 2007-2008. Nothing we did changed this reality which is perhaps the hardest thing for us to come to grips with because it's an ingrained truth of culture that because we have the most expensive military in the world that means we have the best military in the world. But the only thing that money does is generate mountains of hardware doesn't need and can't use. So it's no surprise that the people putting this equipment to its most effective use are the Taliban fighters posing in American military gear to rub their victory in our faces. 

So what now? CNN is running articles about how Afghanistan is home to literal trillions of dollars worth of minerals to power new technologies. This isn't new information, of course, and one of the many frustrations of our occupation was our complete inability to effectively extract Afghanistan's natural resources that weren't poppy seeds for the global heroin trade. There are others who are worried  the fallout of our retreat will embolden China to invade Taiwan or Russia doing evil Russia things. There's a huge fear that the retreat is making us look weak on the world stage which is something we can't afford. 

Except we look weak because we are weak. But it's not the retreat that makes us that way. What makes us weak is our suicidal refusal to recognize let alone admit what our limits are. This causes us to engage in not one but two decades-long wars that left nothing but failure in their wake. It leaves us with a military whose main concern is being a public trough for defense companies to feed at than an organization concerned with national defense. 

We can't accept that the utter collapse of the Afghan government isn't so much a reflection of our complete failures, it has to be the Afghan people's fault for being so weak that they wouldn't defend themselves or their country. It's out of the question that all the time we spent there left the Afghan people with a government so actively hostile to its people that it wasn't a government anyone would risk dying for. We have to push the failure of Afghanistan as far away from us as possible because we refuse to process that we can fail so completely. The thing about that though, is that the world exists outside what we tell ourselves. And maybe, just once, it'd be good for us to recognize that the world where we do everything right and have the best intentions when we get it wrong isn't the world we actually live in.

It's About More Than Being Nice

 I realize that I have the tendency to get too worked up about things. I know it's not sensible for me to get mad at articles like these which compare the fall of the Roman Republic to the United States, especially when they're three years old. But the ideas presented here aren't limited to this article alone, so it's worth spending some time examining why they fall short and why we shouldn't be so eager to map the past completely unto our present, no matter how tempting it looks.

Part of why we should be careful about people telling us how well we mirror the past is that the story is never really about the past, it's always, with no exceptions, about the  problems of our present. So it is with this article from the Smithsonian, which tells us, in all its studied breathlessness, that what doomed the Roman Republic was the instability brought about from violent rhetoric and the disruption of political norms. The article quotes from historian Edward Watts then new book, who says that Rome teaches "its modern descendants the incredible dangers that come along with condoning political obstruction and courting political violence... Roman history could not more clearly show that, when citizens look away as their leaders engage in these corrosive behaviors, their republic is in mortal danger.” 

We'll come back to this idea of how the idea of a passive Roman citizenry is, but we need to sidetrack a little bit to call out the dangers of projecting our own image backward. The article quotes a 2005 book written by historian Cullen Murphy, who takes a more direct approach in comparing Rome and the United States. His argument is that Rome, after defeating Carthage in the Second Punic War, was in the same situation we found ourselves in after the end of World War II. Murphy says that we, like the Romans, found ourselves with "the world on our shoulders; and the implications of that responsibility have skewed things in every part of our society and economy, and put our old political (and other) structures under enormous strain." This wildly conflates the self-dealing fairy tales we've told ourselves in the post-war era with what the Romans got up to once they were the unrivaled power of their time. When Rome looked out at the world, they saw an opportunity for riches and wealth beyond anything they'd ever dreamed of, so they took it. 

It's hard to put into words the scale of plundering the Romans did, but suffice to say when they showed up to your neck of the woods, they were leaving with everything valuable they could find. Gold, silver, fancy furniture, and, most especially, people. The Romans saw the world as their spoils and wasted no time taking whatever they could from who ever they wanted.

What's worse is that the article engages in some of the sloppiest history work I've ever seen. The author, Jason Daley, calls out how Rome's hegemony led to social upheavals like the introduction of secret ballots - which Daley argues led to politicians developing political brands to appeal to the masses - and Rome's move away from civilian conscription armies loyal to Rome to semi-private ones who were dependent on their generals for their pay. These conditions, Daley says, led to a political situation where "whipping up the resentments of the lower classes and threatening political enemies with semi-private armies became the norm."

 Where the sloppy history work comes in is that Daley argues that these trends converged with the political career of Tiberius Gracchus in 134 B.C.The issue here is that the professionalization of Rome's armies, when the land owning requirement to be in the army was dropped, wouldn't happen until Gaius Marius became Counsel in 104 B.C., almost thirty years after Tiberius Gracchus died. Daley is right, sort of, that the flashpoint around Tiberius' actions as Tribune of the Plebs was the land reform bill, but Daley leaves out so much context that it's almost impossible to understand why it was such a big deal in the first place.

To start us off, we need a better understanding of how Roman society, specifically its armies, functioned. Rather than having a professional, standing army under the direct management of the state, the Roman army was drawn from levies of land owning citizens (they would also take conscripts from the other ethnic Italian communities, which Rome had, for the most part, already conquered). Each citizen would be responsible for providing their own weapons and armor, while the state would provide the food and other logistical support. Military service was required for Romans looking to get elected to the Senate or hold any sort of public office which, to the Romans, was incredibly important in their families prestige. This method of warfare worked really well when Rome fought traditional seasonal campaigns, but started to fall apart in the wake of the three Punic Wars.

The big reason why was there was no leave in the Roman army. Meaning, once you got called off to war, you stayed at war, no matter how long it took to finish. Men who left on campaign would leave their farms in the hands of their wives and children which works well enough if you're gone for a few months. But when these wars started lasting for years at a time, it wasn't uncommon for these farms to fall fallow, forcing the families to sell it off to other, richer families. Once all the wars were over, the soldiers who fought them came back to find their families destitute and homeless, their homes part of massive private estates called latifundium.

You may take this moment to ask yourself why couldn't these men couldn't just work their old land under its new owners and the answer to that is well, slaves. The rich who bought up all these failing farms staffed them with the slaves the soldiers brought back with them from their campaigns. So it's in this Rome, filled with conquering heroes with no roofs above their head, that Tiberius Gracchus introduces his land reform bill.

Officially known as the Lex Sempronia Agraria, Tiberius' land reform bill would parcel out land owned by the Roman state to the homeless and the poor so they could be self-sufficient. This bill sought to solve two problems, the first, obviously, was reducing the amount of homeless citizens. It's generally not a good idea to leave men who have spent years fighting for the state with nothing to do but get angry about all the things they no longer have because of the years they spent fighting. The second was that reducing the amount of land-owning citizens directly impacts Rome's ability to create an army. If the only eligible people to fight are landowners and you allow the amount of landowners to significantly decrease, then what you're doing is drastically reducing your martial capacity which, for a Republic suddenly needing to control exponentially more territory than it did before, is a recipe for disaster.

But the Senate did not like Tiberius' plan. Roman politics worked on elaborate client systems, run largely on personal reputations, family ties, and favors. If Tiberius' bill went through, he would have thousands of supporters dependent on his patronage who could be relied on to back his political agenda. Obviously, this could not be allowed. So the Senate did everything it could to stop him. Daley makes a big deal over Tiberius not asking for the Senate's permission to introduce his bill but the thing is, he didn't have to. As Tribune of the Plebs, he could introduce legislation in either the Senate or the Plebeian Assembly whenever he wanted to. It's true the Tribunes usually gave the Senate the heads up, but, given the open hostility to his bill in the Senate, Tiberius did the smart thing and just introduced it on his own terms.

Which brings us to the incident with Marcus Octavius. Octavius was the other Tribune of the Plebs, who the Senate paid to ensure that Tiberius' bill could not pass. So even though Tiberius had the votes, Octavius vetoed the bill. The most common story about what happened next is that Tiberius called for a vote to remove Octavius from office. When people voted to do so, he simply vetoed them as was is power as Tribune. When he wouldn't yield, Tiberius had Octavius physically removed from the Assembly, so the land reform bill could be introduced and passed 1without interference. Now, Tribune's in ancient Rome were sacrosanct, it was literally against the law to touch them. Tiberius went too far when he did this and his supporters got cold feet, so he resorted to basically shutting down the city by refusing to participate in any of his official duties until his bill was passed by the Assembly and the Senate.

Even then, this isn't what got him killed. When the Senate passed the bill, they gave the bare minimum of funds to the commission that was to split up the land so it couldn't function. What ended being the end of Tiberius was the death of King Attalus, ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pergamum. Attalus died without any heirs, so he left the entirety of his fortune, and the kingdom itself, to Rome. Seizing the opportunity to fund his commission, Tiberius claimed control of the money on the grounds that he was the representative of the people it was left to. Naturally, this pissed the Senate off something awful, since foreign affairs were exclusively their domain. In frustration, the Senate began spreading rumors around that Tiberius was out to make himself king. The tension around these rumors built to such a pitch that they are what ultimately led to Tiberius, along with 300 of his supporters,  getting beaten to death in public by his political opponents.

Yet, you would never know those were the stakes just by reading Daley's article. He sweeps every bit of this under the rug, reducing it to "Tiberius went outside political procedures, which is just the worst thing he could do, then some other stuff happened and then he died."

To top off this ridiculous argument, Daley returns again to Watts, who he quotes with the following: "People who are politically engaged are not killing each other and they’re not threatening to kill each other. When they disagree with each other they use political means that were created by the republic for dealing with political conflict." The absurdity of this statement is almost mind-boggling. To classify the Roman citizens who beat an elected official to death at the behest of the political institution in Rome as not politically engaged is the kind of tap dancing routine you don't see outside of Fred Astaire movies. The whole point of all this violence was, and would remain, so the Senate could protect its privilege and powers in the wake of ever increasing demands from the citizenry below that they, too, be included in the benefits of Rome's burgeoning empire.

Harsh language didn't kill the Roman Republic. If anything, the zero-sum nature of Roman politics mixed with powerful interests refusal to compromise on anything that would infringe on their position led to a situation where the only possible way to enforce anything was through violence. The breaking of political norms are superficial, polite things to be upset about but, in Rome and currently, they are merely symptoms of much greater, much more threatening fractures in the political system. If you want to avoid the really bad stuff, like the civil wars that would plague Rome for close to 50 years, you have to deal with the underlying power imbalances that drive political systems to become so irrevocably broken.

There's a reason Daley leaves out all this context. Without it, he can reshape the complicated political situation of the late Roman Republic, which then allows him to recast the political stakes into whatever he wants them to be. This ultimately allows him to focus on the most meaningless aspect of the end of the Roman republic, that people stopped caring about the rules. No where does he stop to consider that there are bigger problems in society than whether politicians play nice with each other. Flouting norms without consequence is important because it tells you that people believe they are no longer obligated to follow them. The thing is though, and I can't stress this enough, the reasons why people don't feel that obligation are more important than the rules themselves. Trying to game out whether Tiberius is more responsible than the Senate for fracturing political norms misses the point that both of them felt they had the power to do so. 

Like I said, I know I get too worked about things. Especially bad takes on history and what they tell us about the present. At the same time, how we view the past, and what went wrong in it, can't help but shape how we view what the problems of our world even are. If the best we can do is say that we should all be nice to each other and let everyone speak, we're doomed. If we can't learn enough about the past to question the important things in our society like who has power, what are they using it for, and how are they keeping it, then we'll just be stuck in these useless cycles until the world collapses around us while we're all standing around looking stupid with or mouths hanging open, wondering how any of this could have ever happened.