It’s an interesting article, but I feel the analysis is very one sided. For example, “here are the costs of putting boots on the ground against ISIS: look there are costs, we shouldn’t do it!”
But what about the benefits?
In rational analysis one has to be very careful to not construct these kinds of one-sided analyses because they are a fully general counterargument. Everything has costs. By just pointing at the costs and not even mentioning the benefits you can make anything look bad.
The point about being overly emotional in the immediate wake of a major disaster is a good one though. What do you think we could have done differently and better after 9/11 by being more rational and less emotional?
I hear you about the analysis. Unfortunately, the word length restrictions of 700 words made it impossible for me to write a nuanced piece. I wanted to make the large point about avoiding being overly emotional, and that meant going against the specific emotional tonality and saber-rattling and attention bias.
After 9/11? I think we could have done much more to make a plan and get support from other countries on actually rebuilding Afghanistan after we conquered it. The current mess there is a testament to our poorly-planned entry into that war. I’m not going to go into details of how to do it, but that’s my short answer.
Maybe, though I strongly suspect that lack of “buildings” is not the main constraint on Afghanistan—more like lack of civil culture. To fix Afghanistan, you would have to replace the culture, which is not really a feasible option.
Yeah, very tough. Britain in roughly the year 600 AD is probably socioculturally comparable to Afghanistan today. It took us 1400 years of civil wars and bloodshed to get to where we are now.
Probably magical brain-altering nanobots for 90% of the population would be the only way to get there quickly—suddenly everyone wakes up one morning feeling that they are atheists or moderate Muslims and their primary loyalty is to their country and to humanity as a whole, rather than to the local warlord/sect, that they love freedom and democracy, etc. Maybe I’m being pessimistic.
It took me a minute or two to figure out what you were trying to say. For anyone else who didn’t get it first-read, I believe Lumifer’s saying something like:
“World War II was 60 years ago. On a 1,400 year timescale, that’s not getting somewhere, that’s just a random blip of time where no gigantic wars happened; those blips have happened before. What do you mean ‘to get to where we are now’?”
Now, to answer that, I think he means “to get to a society where fear of being killed or kidnapped (then killed) isn’t a normal part of every day life, and women can wear whatever they want.”
More specifically, if you are operating on the time scale of a millenium and a half and setting up the contemporary Western society as the one to emulate, that contemporary Western society includes, say, the entire XX century. So you’re going to emulate attempts at genocide, concentration camps, massive slaughter of civilians through nukes and firebombings, etc.?
“to get to a society where fear of being killed or kidnapped (then killed) isn’t a normal part of every day life, and women can wear whatever they want.”
That’s you normal hunter-gatherer tribe, Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Rome—pretty much any successful society.
Of course if you’re treating “women can wear whatever they want” literally, it’s not true for contemporary West as well. See the public obscenity laws.
I would say that a ground campaign would defeat IS in Syria and Iraq. I cannot be bothered to dig for a definite source for that, but USA, EU military is vastly better than IS and I don’t want to waste my time arguing with anyone who thinks that an America/EU/Russian alliance would lose a ground war against IS in Iraq and Syria.
So IS would be left as a guerilla operation in that part of the world, rather than a fully fledged state. They would still kill people, but guerilla methods are less effective than what you can do with full control.
The downside is that the civilized world is bad at nationbuilding—we failed in Afghanistan and to some extent in Iraq. Obviously that would leave an opening for IS to come back again in 25 years, like the Taliban are probably going to in Afghanistan.
But this debate has already progressed beyond the article in the OP.
Yes US/EU troops are superior but as afghanistan and iraq showed, simply having those troops in the country does not solve your problems. Military victory, in the sense that a nominally friendly government ends up in control can be achieved without boots on the ground, it’s far easier for friendly groups to win with air support and supplies but you have to avoid public perception that the new state is just a puppet.
I would say that a ground campaign would defeat IS in Syria and Iraq. I cannot be bothered to dig for a definite source for that, but USA, EU military is vastly better than IS and I don’t want to waste my time arguing with anyone who thinks that an America/EU/Russian alliance would lose a ground war against IS in Iraq and Syria.
Then why didn’t the US win against the groups that are precursors to daesh when they had boots on the ground in Iraq?
They didn’t beat Germans in Germany. They beat the German army outside of it and the Germans admitted defeat. The Sunni groups that are precursors of deash and that were active before the US left Iraq were never beaten to defeat.
The question is what you mean by “win”. It would not be very reasonable to describe reality with the statement that the US lost a war against some group or groups in Iraq. But they didn’t wipe those people out, and consequently those people can still do things. The US would win in Syria if they did the same thing, and in the same sense, and with the same sort of consequences.
Tacitus said that the Romans were accustomed to “make a desert and call it peace.” If the US wanted to win a war in that sense, they could. But they don’t want to, and won’t, basically because pretty much everyone considers it to be immoral. But as long as you don’t do that, there will still be people there with the same ideas and intentions, and some of those people will act on those ideas and intentions.
According to historical analysis of every resolved insurgency since 1944, conducted by RAND, the best predictor of success in defeating one is achieving conventional military superiority. Details here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z1.html
Um, most folks who have looked into this matter with any kind of effort/depth argue that putting boots on the ground is pretty much the only way of successfully challenging daesh. Air campaigns are showy and all, but they’re inherently limited even for something like short-term containment. Doing nothing but air campaigns (the current approach) amounts to leaving the existing situation in place.
There are boots on the ground, it’s just that they are not Western. Having Assad, the Kurds, and the Iraqi government finish off ISIS weakened by air strikes looks like an acceptable solution to me.
Most likely, Assad (with Russian help) will finish everyone else first.
Russia’s goal is to have Assad as the winner, and they will optimize for that. Fighting against ISIS would be a waste of resources for them—other countries will do that for them, so they can focus on the remaining Assad’s enemies.
And the other big players know that. This is why the situation is so difficult to solve, although in theory it should work just as proposed (weaken ISIS by bombing, and let their enemies do the rest).
Russia’s goal is to have Assad as the winner, and they will optimize for that. Fighting against ISIS would be a waste of resources for them
Um, ISIS controls large chunks of Syria and their capital, Raqqa, is a Syrian town which, I assume, Assad would like to have back.
Moreover, as far as I understand, ISIS wants to have a major battle with the Western/Christian/Crusader army by the Syrian town of Dabiq (to kick-start the Apocalypse) and will, presumably, commit all its forces to it.
Um, ISIS controls large chunks of Syria and their capital, Raqqa, is a Syrian town which, I assume, Assad would like to have back.
Sure. Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. Assad has multiple goals. Destroying ISIS (and getting the capital back) is one of them. Destroying the rebels is another. Destroying Kurds is yet another.
If you have three goals, A, B, C, and you know that most of the world will support you with A, it makes sense to spend your resources (such as the army) on B and C first.
Scenario 1: Assad destroys ISIS first. Other countries will help him, but he will still pay a significant part of the cost. After ISIS is gone, most countries are no longer interested in helping Assad. Some of them may even object against his fight against the rebels and Kurds. Some of them may even start supporting the rebels again.
Scenario 2: Assad destroys the rebels and Kurds first. Then he looks at the rest of the world and says: “You guys are still interested in helping me destroy ISIS, right?”
Yes, and the first and most important goal is to survive. I don’t think Assad has that much latitude in choosing which enemies to go after and which to ignore for the time being. He has been amazingly tenacious, but it’s far from a foregone conclusion that he’ll be the only one left standing at the end.
Yes, and the first and most important goal is to survive. I don’t think Assad has that much latitude in choosing which enemies to go after and which to ignore for the time being.
Yes, and that means he won’t focus on ISIS as ISIS mostly doesn’t fight against him but against rebel groups that fight him.
I suspect who is fighting who at the moment is mostly driven by tactical considerations and just plain physical proximity. ISIS, basically, fights everyone it comes into contact with. If there are rebels between it and Assad, it will fight the rebels. If Assad pushes the rebels back and comes into direct contact with ISIS, it will fight Assad.
But IS seems to be winning or at least surviving, presumably because its opponents are not really that powerful and/or not motivated to finish the job.
Whatever you think is really going on, one cannot deny that It has been a few years now. To me, that seems unacceptably long.
So, what are you willing to pay to accomplish the goal?
Technically, it’s not hard—just repeat either of the Iraq wars. But if you take just a slightly wider view, those wars were not successful in making the region West-friendly and stable, and the overall cost, in both lives and money, was very high. What makes you think another military excursion into the region will fare any better?
I think it depends on the quality of the nation-building that happens afterwards.
IMO merely defeating IS shouldn’t be that expensive, but I can imagine the nationbuilding bit being very expensive and I can imagine IS going underground and executing a suicide bombing campaign, just like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, militarily defeating IS counts under the “benefits” column of the analysis—as a pure point of rationality—even if the cost is too great.
Actually, are there any positive examples of Western nationbuilding after the poster children of post-WW2 Japan and Germany? I don’t know if South Korea would count, but for clarity let’s take the last 50 years. Is there anything?
That’s not nationbuilding. That’s just old Western powers keeping their former colonies from disintegrating into failed states. You can also read it as picking a side and propping it up with military force.
If Mali is a successful example of nationbuilding, thank you, I’ll pass.
Still, I think you are correct to be pessimistic here. Nation building is a task which we really are pretty clueless about, sometimes because political correctness forces bad epistemological habits onto us.
keeping their former colonies from disintegrating into failed states.
Um, “not disintegrating into a failed state” is a pretty clear prerequisite to any sort of sustained social/economic development (what you apparently mean by ‘nation building’). This may be somewhat sobering for a few advocates of pure anarcho-capitalism, but is not really a surprise to anyone else.
You’re going along with a blatant and partisan lie. GW Bush accepted a deadline for withdrawal after the Iraqi government made noise about Iraqi sovereignty. Obama technically tried to negotiate a new deal to keep troops there, but could not reach agreement about legal immunity. If you squint and turn your head you could try to see this as Obama choosing to withdraw, but to say he did it “unilaterally” is a bald-faced lie.
most folks who have looked into this matter with any kind of effort/depth argue that putting boots on the ground is pretty much the only way of successfully challenging daesh.
Who are these “most folks”, what are their incentives, and what alternatives have they considered?
It’s an interesting article, but I feel the analysis is very one sided. For example, “here are the costs of putting boots on the ground against ISIS: look there are costs, we shouldn’t do it!”
But what about the benefits?
In rational analysis one has to be very careful to not construct these kinds of one-sided analyses because they are a fully general counterargument. Everything has costs. By just pointing at the costs and not even mentioning the benefits you can make anything look bad.
The point about being overly emotional in the immediate wake of a major disaster is a good one though. What do you think we could have done differently and better after 9/11 by being more rational and less emotional?
I hear you about the analysis. Unfortunately, the word length restrictions of 700 words made it impossible for me to write a nuanced piece. I wanted to make the large point about avoiding being overly emotional, and that meant going against the specific emotional tonality and saber-rattling and attention bias.
After 9/11? I think we could have done much more to make a plan and get support from other countries on actually rebuilding Afghanistan after we conquered it. The current mess there is a testament to our poorly-planned entry into that war. I’m not going to go into details of how to do it, but that’s my short answer.
Maybe, though I strongly suspect that lack of “buildings” is not the main constraint on Afghanistan—more like lack of civil culture. To fix Afghanistan, you would have to replace the culture, which is not really a feasible option.
Yup, I was using “rebuilding” in the broader sense of socioeconomic/cultural infrastructure.
Yeah, very tough. Britain in roughly the year 600 AD is probably socioculturally comparable to Afghanistan today. It took us 1400 years of civil wars and bloodshed to get to where we are now.
Probably magical brain-altering nanobots for 90% of the population would be the only way to get there quickly—suddenly everyone wakes up one morning feeling that they are atheists or moderate Muslims and their primary loyalty is to their country and to humanity as a whole, rather than to the local warlord/sect, that they love freedom and democracy, etc. Maybe I’m being pessimistic.
On that time scale WW2 was yesterday. So tell me, where did it take you 1400 years to get to?
It took me a minute or two to figure out what you were trying to say. For anyone else who didn’t get it first-read, I believe Lumifer’s saying something like:
“World War II was 60 years ago. On a 1,400 year timescale, that’s not getting somewhere, that’s just a random blip of time where no gigantic wars happened; those blips have happened before. What do you mean ‘to get to where we are now’?”
Now, to answer that, I think he means “to get to a society where fear of being killed or kidnapped (then killed) isn’t a normal part of every day life, and women can wear whatever they want.”
More specifically, if you are operating on the time scale of a millenium and a half and setting up the contemporary Western society as the one to emulate, that contemporary Western society includes, say, the entire XX century. So you’re going to emulate attempts at genocide, concentration camps, massive slaughter of civilians through nukes and firebombings, etc.?
That’s you normal hunter-gatherer tribe, Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Rome—pretty much any successful society.
Of course if you’re treating “women can wear whatever they want” literally, it’s not true for contemporary West as well. See the public obscenity laws.
I’m having trouble thinking of many benefits beyond slightly more control over local events.
Unless it’s the very general benefits like “helps workers in states with lots of defense contractors”
I would say that a ground campaign would defeat IS in Syria and Iraq. I cannot be bothered to dig for a definite source for that, but USA, EU military is vastly better than IS and I don’t want to waste my time arguing with anyone who thinks that an America/EU/Russian alliance would lose a ground war against IS in Iraq and Syria.
So IS would be left as a guerilla operation in that part of the world, rather than a fully fledged state. They would still kill people, but guerilla methods are less effective than what you can do with full control.
The downside is that the civilized world is bad at nationbuilding—we failed in Afghanistan and to some extent in Iraq. Obviously that would leave an opening for IS to come back again in 25 years, like the Taliban are probably going to in Afghanistan.
But this debate has already progressed beyond the article in the OP.
Yes US/EU troops are superior but as afghanistan and iraq showed, simply having those troops in the country does not solve your problems. Military victory, in the sense that a nominally friendly government ends up in control can be achieved without boots on the ground, it’s far easier for friendly groups to win with air support and supplies but you have to avoid public perception that the new state is just a puppet.
Then why didn’t the US win against the groups that are precursors to daesh when they had boots on the ground in Iraq?
Did the Allies win WW I?
I think it is pretty obvious that by most measures that the central powers did not win the war, but did that victory create a lasting peace?
It obviously didn’t. The way the “victory” in WW I was handled pretty much set the stage for WW II.
It is the same way in the middle east, you can have a “victory” or “win” but that does not mean long lasting peace.
They didn’t beat Germans in Germany. They beat the German army outside of it and the Germans admitted defeat. The Sunni groups that are precursors of deash and that were active before the US left Iraq were never beaten to defeat.
The question is what you mean by “win”. It would not be very reasonable to describe reality with the statement that the US lost a war against some group or groups in Iraq. But they didn’t wipe those people out, and consequently those people can still do things. The US would win in Syria if they did the same thing, and in the same sense, and with the same sort of consequences.
Tacitus said that the Romans were accustomed to “make a desert and call it peace.” If the US wanted to win a war in that sense, they could. But they don’t want to, and won’t, basically because pretty much everyone considers it to be immoral. But as long as you don’t do that, there will still be people there with the same ideas and intentions, and some of those people will act on those ideas and intentions.
According to historical analysis of every resolved insurgency since 1944, conducted by RAND, the best predictor of success in defeating one is achieving conventional military superiority. Details here: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z1.html
Um, most folks who have looked into this matter with any kind of effort/depth argue that putting boots on the ground is pretty much the only way of successfully challenging daesh. Air campaigns are showy and all, but they’re inherently limited even for something like short-term containment. Doing nothing but air campaigns (the current approach) amounts to leaving the existing situation in place.
It’s far far harder for a faction to defend itself when their enemies have massive air support and they do not.
Isis lose with or without boots on the ground if their current enemies in the region are simply given heavy air support and supplies.
Putting boots on the ground, Benefits:
More local control.
Better trained soldiers.
Cons:
Expense cash.
Expense lives.
Needing to run an occupation.
Difficulty of nation building due to resentment against your new state from local peoples about foreign occupiers.
Has anyone ever won a war with air power alone? Arguably the 1999 bombing campaign of Serbia—but then you could argue that that is notable specifically as an exception, and had some special circumstances surrounding it which don’t seem to be present with IS. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia#Arguments_for_strategic_air_power
There are boots on the ground, it’s just that they are not Western. Having Assad, the Kurds, and the Iraqi government finish off ISIS weakened by air strikes looks like an acceptable solution to me.
Most likely, Assad (with Russian help) will finish everyone else first.
Russia’s goal is to have Assad as the winner, and they will optimize for that. Fighting against ISIS would be a waste of resources for them—other countries will do that for them, so they can focus on the remaining Assad’s enemies.
And the other big players know that. This is why the situation is so difficult to solve, although in theory it should work just as proposed (weaken ISIS by bombing, and let their enemies do the rest).
Um, ISIS controls large chunks of Syria and their capital, Raqqa, is a Syrian town which, I assume, Assad would like to have back.
Moreover, as far as I understand, ISIS wants to have a major battle with the Western/Christian/Crusader army by the Syrian town of Dabiq (to kick-start the Apocalypse) and will, presumably, commit all its forces to it.
Sure. Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. Assad has multiple goals. Destroying ISIS (and getting the capital back) is one of them. Destroying the rebels is another. Destroying Kurds is yet another.
If you have three goals, A, B, C, and you know that most of the world will support you with A, it makes sense to spend your resources (such as the army) on B and C first.
Scenario 1: Assad destroys ISIS first. Other countries will help him, but he will still pay a significant part of the cost. After ISIS is gone, most countries are no longer interested in helping Assad. Some of them may even object against his fight against the rebels and Kurds. Some of them may even start supporting the rebels again.
Scenario 2: Assad destroys the rebels and Kurds first. Then he looks at the rest of the world and says: “You guys are still interested in helping me destroy ISIS, right?”
Yes, and the first and most important goal is to survive. I don’t think Assad has that much latitude in choosing which enemies to go after and which to ignore for the time being. He has been amazingly tenacious, but it’s far from a foregone conclusion that he’ll be the only one left standing at the end.
Yes, and that means he won’t focus on ISIS as ISIS mostly doesn’t fight against him but against rebel groups that fight him.
I suspect who is fighting who at the moment is mostly driven by tactical considerations and just plain physical proximity. ISIS, basically, fights everyone it comes into contact with. If there are rebels between it and Assad, it will fight the rebels. If Assad pushes the rebels back and comes into direct contact with ISIS, it will fight Assad.
But IS seems to be winning or at least surviving, presumably because its opponents are not really that powerful and/or not motivated to finish the job.
Whatever you think is really going on, one cannot deny that It has been a few years now. To me, that seems unacceptably long.
So, what are you willing to pay to accomplish the goal?
Technically, it’s not hard—just repeat either of the Iraq wars. But if you take just a slightly wider view, those wars were not successful in making the region West-friendly and stable, and the overall cost, in both lives and money, was very high. What makes you think another military excursion into the region will fare any better?
I think it depends on the quality of the nation-building that happens afterwards.
IMO merely defeating IS shouldn’t be that expensive, but I can imagine the nationbuilding bit being very expensive and I can imagine IS going underground and executing a suicide bombing campaign, just like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Still, militarily defeating IS counts under the “benefits” column of the analysis—as a pure point of rationality—even if the cost is too great.
Why would the answer be any different from “the usual”..?
True. And just as true for North Korea.
The neoconservative attempt at nationbuilding in Iraq may, in fact, count as “worse than usual” for this purpose…
Actually, are there any positive examples of Western nationbuilding after the poster children of post-WW2 Japan and Germany? I don’t know if South Korea would count, but for clarity let’s take the last 50 years. Is there anything?
The French intervention in Mali comes to mind. Sierra Leone also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_military_intervention_in_the_Sierra_Leone_Civil_War#Impact
That’s not nationbuilding. That’s just old Western powers keeping their former colonies from disintegrating into failed states. You can also read it as picking a side and propping it up with military force.
If Mali is a successful example of nationbuilding, thank you, I’ll pass.
They both look better than Afghanistan though.
Still, I think you are correct to be pessimistic here. Nation building is a task which we really are pretty clueless about, sometimes because political correctness forces bad epistemological habits onto us.
Um, “not disintegrating into a failed state” is a pretty clear prerequisite to any sort of sustained social/economic development (what you apparently mean by ‘nation building’). This may be somewhat sobering for a few advocates of pure anarcho-capitalism, but is not really a surprise to anyone else.
Nope.
Try again.
If France and the UK do that to their former colonies in Syria and Iraq, it’ll be a significant improvement over the status quo.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but they are probably not able and certainly not willing.
How about a rationalist article encouraging them to become willing rather than the “let’s not alienate muslims” idiocy Gleb wrote?
Encourage who? M.Hollande? X-)
ISIS doesn’t have nukes and isn’t being implicitly backed by a neighboring superpower.
The second was until Obama decided to unilaterally pull out prematurely for no particularly good reason.
He promised that to his voters, if I remember correctly.
May be not a good reasons strategically, but still a good reason politically.
You’re going along with a blatant and partisan lie. GW Bush accepted a deadline for withdrawal after the Iraqi government made noise about Iraqi sovereignty. Obama technically tried to negotiate a new deal to keep troops there, but could not reach agreement about legal immunity. If you squint and turn your head you could try to see this as Obama choosing to withdraw, but to say he did it “unilaterally” is a bald-faced lie.
Only in the most technical sense, as soon as the Iraqi’s made a counter-offer different from his first one he called of negotiations.
Who are these “most folks”, what are their incentives, and what alternatives have they considered?