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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg, December 26, 2021 (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

SILVER SPRING—As I write this on Christmas Day (and the day after), to any thoughtful Christians, on this particular occasion and as they read this particular piece, I will not wish them a “merry Christmas,” but forcefully implore that they think of certain others, if but for a moment (yet hopefully longer). 

Much as some (hardly all and I doubt most) African-Americans and many (very probably most) Native Americans look at the Fourth of July—Independence Day—in America differently than other Americans, let us spare some effort to consider the “pagans” of Late Antiquity, those who lived to see Christianity come to dominate the Roman Imperial government and those who came after to see their way of life virtually exterminated, save for some brave folks, mostly in the most rural of countrysides or remote mountains, farther from the reach of Roman Imperial authorities.

Those “others” I ask to be considered are those who would have been the vast majority of the people living in the Roman Empire at the time from the era of Emperor Constantine’s rise to power in 312 C.E. (Common Era, an improvement, in my view, over the sectarian A.D.), in part due to his then-partial, not-yet-total, embrace of Christianity; these “others” over time would be much of the population through the next few centuries but declining as a portion as Christianity was forced upon the entirety of the Roman Empire—nearly every corner and nearly every person, certainly on anyone within clerical or Roman Imperial reach who was considered “pagan” (all non-Christian Romans who were not Jewish).

“Pagan” itself emerged as a Christian pejorative term, one the diverse range of polytheists and non-Jewish, non-Christian monotheists of the Greco-Roman world would never, ever have used to refer to themselves, as Catherine Nixey, author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, is quick to point out in her brisk and energetic account of Christianity’s takeover of the Roman state, society, and culture.  In fact, in the Roman era before Christianity’s takeover of Rome, it was not at all common for people to define themselves primarily or in large part by their religion (Jews, of course, were a tiny exception during this period); the sharp delineation of people as being of one religion or another as a core part of or primary indicator of their identity was, in any widespread sense, an invention of the Christians of this era (and a rather regrettable one).  If you were a good citizen and obeyed the laws of Rome, before, Romans generally didn’t give a fig what gods you or anyone else worshipped.  You were free to ignore their gods just as much as you were free to adopt them or worship your own, and there was not a feeling that by believing in your gods that that meant you had to deny anyone else’s gods, let alone call them demons.  Apart from the sensitive situation with Jews and Judaism, identifying primarily by religion is essentially unheard of in this time outside Christianity.

But Nixey’s point is that it is essentially unheard of today because triumphalist Christian accounts have shaped our view of this distant era into, primarily, the following:

After centuries of fierce persecution at the hands of sadistic pagan Romans, Christians inevitably rose to dominate the Roman Imperial sate, destroy the false gods (actually demons serving the Devil) and old religions (cults celebrating evil and Satan) that had dominated the Roman world but never really captured the hearts and minds of the people, rose to free the people from evil and superstitious idolatry by benevolently bring the light of the One True Faith and One True God to them, and led mankind into a new era of truth, love, and kindness based on God’s Law and God’s Love.  And, all through the ages, the Church preserved the wisdom of the ancients by painstakingly copying their texts in monasteries that became centers of learning, scholarship, and wisdom.

The truth could not be further from this false account (apart from monasteries preserving some classical texts after Christians had destroyed nearly all the others), and Nixey is here to correct the record.

She quickly and skillfully dismisses any accounts of being biased for not focusing on the examples of kindness, compassion, and scholarship that Christianity has given to the world, as that story has been told by the Christian victors time and time again, ad nauseam and often greatly embellished, exaggerated, or omitting key context.  No need to tread well-trodden and built-up, tended ground; no, in her book, it is the suppressed, even obliterated, the voiceless and long forgotten, whose mantle she takes up to give voice to and whose feelings, thoughts, and very existence she is determined to present to us.

And she presents it well.  This is not a book of deep scholarship nor one that will meticulously trace the Christian revolution and the genocide (certainly by our modern legal definition) of “pagans” in its entirety, throughout the whole of the Empire, event by event, discussing the scholarly debates in detail about this and that motive or event.  Instead, she is keen to connect emotionally with her readers, recreating with literary dash what it might have been like to think, feel, and experience the times, places, events, and people about which she is writing, especially those perspectives long lost, suppressed, or ignored.  To this end, she selects a smattering of major events and narratives throughout the several centuries in question and throughout the empire, giving context and descriptive recreations for each, peppered with quotes from Christian and “pagan” alike.

And the picture she paints should give Christians and anyone not familiar with the truth pause, much in the way Americans who are not Native Americans might pause when thinking about Thanksgiving or Manifest Destiny, or, indeed, the very land on which they live.  This is because the ground on which Christians rose to control the Roman Empire and Western World was laid with a foundation of ash, rubble, and blood from the destruction of the existing world—ash, rubble, and blood that came from Christian violence, destruction, or murder of “pagan” books, temples, and worshippers.

A Record of Pious Sacrilege

Much like the later Crusaders, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, and ISIS, none of this is in doubt because these Christians gleefully recorded many of their atrocities and killings, immortalizing them in hymns, arts, and the texts of the early Church Fathers (indeed, they often sang joyously as they went about their destruction and murder).  Figures like Augustine and (even more so) John Chrysostom openly sermonized to their congregations to commit violence and murder against not just pagans who would not get with the program but any wayward or erring Christians, for doing so was not a net harm: it was out of love, since it was deemed better to harm the body in this life than to allow the soul to writhe in eternal hellfire in the next.  In the words of Augustine, “where there is terror, there is salvation… Oh, merciful savagery!” (240).  For Chrysostom, if a Christian heard a person blaspheme against the Christian god or Christian teachings, “go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so.  Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow” (234-235).  Similar sentiments would be proclaimed by many other bishops, priests, and monks.  For one eventual saint, the ends justified any means: “There is no crime for those who have Christ” (230).  It was clear that if any Christian zealotry broke Roman law or violated the legal rights of the target of their righteousness, such concerns were illegitimate when placed next to the laws of God.  In fact, if Christians were killed while attacking “pagan” temples, clergy, or worshippers, such “martyrs” would be richly rewarded in heaven and forever exalted among the faithful on earth.  Sound familiar?  It is Christian jihad in the ISIS sense.  And many of the men committing these crimes are saints even today in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or both (even other Christian sects, too).

How did this revolution take hold?  In the smashing of temples and statues to rubble, the mass burning of books and the barging into people’s homes if they were merely suspected of having “pagan” art or literature, a hating of sex and sexuality, theatre, music, dance, and festivals, all of which were seen as the work of demons and punishable by violence and torture.  Shaving, for many, was a sign of “pagan” inclinations (even, too, any kind of colorful fashion, showing of skin for women, or taking especial care with bathing and hygiene).  Science, math, objective history, philosophy were also “pagan” demonic works since they did not neatly line up with Christian teachings, and scientists, surgeons, teachers all saw works of theirs purged and burned, their places of operation shuttered or destroyed if they did not adopt Christian ways (and for many of them, this would have made their work impossible or compromised their values and beliefs to a level beyond that which they could bear).  The stubborn or those who spoke out against these restrictions were forbidden from continuing their trade, tortured, exiled, or murdered, their property seized and their works obliterated from the face of the earth.  The intellectual and the worldly is despised.  Misogyny is pervasive.  Homosexuals were newly tortured, their genitals often cut off, often leading to death.

This, too, was an era of thought crimes, and absolute destruction of free speech, inquiry, and debate enforced by murder and torture, often with the full backing of the state but also often by mobs of incited and dispatched-by-a-cleric Christian lay folk for whom there was little to no accountability.  In her account of the terrible murder—just for having respect and influence as a non-Christian and a woman—of Hypatia, a female philosopher based in Alexandria and renowned throughout the Empire in her day for her brilliance and wisdom, sought after by local rulers and the sons of elites from across the Mediterranean—Nixey notes that her close confidante, the local Roman in charge named Orestes, is helpless with his small retinue to stand up to the hundreds of militarized Christians known as parabalani—“the reckless ones,” a sort of YMCA cohort but with a distinctly terrorist bent (135)—who enforce the will of their extremist bishop (Hypatia and Orestes’s tale is wondrously depicted in Alejandro Amenábar’s 2009 film Agora­, the two characters poignantly portrayed by Rachel Weisz and Oscar Isaac).

Terrifying Modern Parallels and Digging into an Ancient Mentality of Hate

Reading these accounts, one cannot but help see the giant overlaps with ISIS; indeed, these Christians come off as the ISIS of Christianity, Rome under their rule resembling Baghdadi’s caliphate or Afghanistan under the 1990s Taliban (not today’s apparently—for now at least—relatively kinder, gentler version).  Even today, Christianity celebrates these terrorists and murderers from its infancy.  The harshness of their rule; their hatred of free inquiry, joy, merriment, and women’s autonomy; their self-adoption of the roles of judges, jury, and executioners; even their appearance—both ISIS and the early Christian enforcers were generally severe young men in dark clothing with unshaved beards—bear such a distinct resemblance to the worst of ISIS and Taliban rule, the worst of the terrorists of our own era, that it is hard to see the difference between them as you read Nixey, hard to not see them as one in the same, with the most extreme of religious terrorists in our modern era clear inheritors of a clear tradition that more or less begins with these Christian fanatics (“saints”).

If you doubt this, consider that, after a statue of Athena in Palmyra at the ends of the Syrian desert was desecrated and mutilated by Christians in the 380s, the very same statue, partially restored and on display in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was similarly desecrated and mutilated when ISIS took over the city in 2015 (xxxi, 114).  Just like their Christian and Jewish religious forebears, they were simply carrying out God’s explicit, clear command to destroy “idols,” as had the Taliban in 2001 with two massive Buddhist statues.

But to truly understand the mentality of these hostile faithful from Rome’s era of religious tumult, we need look to nothing other than the Ten Commandments.  Depending on your religious sect or faith, the following either comprises the first two or first three of the Ten Commandments:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

You shall not have other gods beside me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;

you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation;

but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not invoke the name of the LORD, your God, in vain. For the LORD will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain. —Ex: 20:2-7

Badmouthing or criticizing God?  The same punishment:

A man born of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and in the camp a fight broke out between the son of the Israelite woman and an Israelite man.

The son of the Israelite woman uttered the LORD’s name in a curse and blasphemed. So he was brought to Moses—now his mother’s name was Shelomith, daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan—

and he was kept in custody till a decision from the LORD should settle the case for them.

The LORD then said to Moses:

Take the blasphemer outside the camp, and when all who heard him have laid their hands* on his head, let the whole community stone him.

Tell the Israelites: Anyone who blasphemes God shall bear the penalty;

whoever utters the name of the LORD in a curse shall be put to death. The whole community shall stone that person; alien and native-born alike must be put to death for uttering the LORD’s name in a curse…

You shall have but one rule, for alien and native-born alike. I, the LORD, am your God.

When Moses told this to the Israelites, they took the blasphemer outside the camp and stoned him; they did just as the LORD commanded Moses. —Lev. 24:10-16, 22-23

You read Leviticus and Chrysostom correctly: the punishment applies even to those who aren’t Christian.

As an adult, I am struck by how these first commandments (including the Third or Fourth, depending, again, on the faith/sect, to keep the Sabbath holy)—three out of ten or four out of ten, no small portion—have absolutely nothing to do with morality, with right or wrong, but are about a jealous—even petty—God who will brook no competition or criticism, and, indeed, has ample punishments and miseries in store for those worshipping other gods or criticizing him in both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim) scripture (perhaps there is room for much improvement?).  Pagan idolaters are to be killed, their shrines and statues destroyed, murder and destruction ordered directly by God himself.  Just one example here:

If your brother, your father’s child or your mother’s child, your son or daughter, your beloved spouse, or your intimate friend entices you secretly, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you and your ancestors have not known,

any of the gods of the surrounding peoples, near to you or far away, from one end of the earth to the other:

do not yield or listen to any such person; show no pity or compassion and do not shield such a one,

but kill that person. Your hand shall be the first raised to put such a one to death; the hand of all the people shall follow.

You shall stone that person to death, for seeking to lead you astray from the LORD, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

And all Israel shall hear of it and fear, and never again do such evil as this in your midst.

If you hear it said concerning one of the cities which the LORD, your God, gives you to dwell in,

that certain scoundrels have sprung up in your midst and have led astray the inhabitants of their city, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you have not known,

you must inquire carefully into the matter and investigate it thoroughly. If you find that it is true and an established fact that this abomination has been committed in your midst,

you shall put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, placing the city and all that is in it, even its livestock, under the ban.

Having heaped up all its spoils in the middle of its square, you shall burn the city with all its spoils as a whole burnt offering to the LORD, your God. Let it be a heap of ruins forever, never to be rebuilt. —Deut. 13:7-17

As a child growing up in America, these first few of the Ten Commandments always struck me as odd: everyone where I was (and, indeed, virtually all of America in the 1980s) was either Christian or Jewish, worshipping the same God if differently.  But back when Constantine began to favor Christianity in the early fourth century C.E., Christians were a small minority, surrounded generally not by other monotheists (the most notable exception being Jews concentrated in a few areas, though a considerable number of “pagans” practiced different monotheisms) but by polytheist worshippers of Greco-Roman gods or their Celtic, Germanic, North African, Egyptian, or Eastern equivalents.  The presence of competing “false” gods—Paul clearly states they are not just false, but actual evil demons—would have been overwhelming to a Christian.

So while we today shrug at passages about idols and pagans, in the context of early Christianity, nothing was more important than placing the Jesus/God before the myriad of other gods and God’s words were clear in this most important, most emphasized of Christian teachings: idolators and competing gods were not to be tolerated but utterly destroyed, their worshippers forced into submission and conversion or killed.  Thus, the most important part of being a good Christian was not loving your neighbor with kindness, but accepting the One True God in a way that demanded non-acceptance, confrontation, and violence with neighbors if they did not accept Christianity. 

We must go back in time to realize that, in daily life, it was almost impossible to escape the presence of these “demons”: giant, exquisite statues regularly lavished with public sacrifice and worship in the most prominent places of any village, town, or city.  For early Christians, they were living in a time of never-ending holy war, an age of terror in which, as laid out by scripture and endlessly repeated by Christian clergy, the evil demonic gods that surrounded them wished them harm, sought to steal and condemn their souls through temptation, and were challenging their own God for supremacy.

In this mindset, every painting in a bathhouse or a private home with naked people, every bit of incense, every statue, every book of “pagan” filth, was part of this never-ending campaign against Christianity and must be destroyed.  Even if the masses were not zealous enough, over the centuries after traditional Greco-Roman religion and philosophy were nearly wiped out, the stones of the remnants of the last “pagan” temples and marble of the remaining “pagan” statues would be broken up to build churches or repair houses or other infrastructure; Plato or Cicero would be erased and replaced or written over with Paul or the texts of the early Church Fathers.  So, to a large extent, these people and their culture were destroyed, often utterly.  That is why so few works of the art and literature from this era remains–less than ten percent of classical literature survives today, including only one percent of Latin literature [177])—that is why nearly every statue from the period shows hacked-off noses, gouged-out eyes, chipped-away nipples, or some other deliberate mutilation.

I am always amused when people claim Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, the latter’s texts and traditions containing similar injunctions, even with the behavior of Prophet Muhammad himself) is a religion of peace.  Christians will often say that “Jesus came to change the ‘bad’ stuff in the Old Testament (Jewish Torah), making Christianity all about love,” having obviously not studied their New Testament well at all, where Jesus clearly and repeatedly affirms the Old Testament laws (and while there are some New Testament examples apparently changing some Old Testament rules, they are not as forceful, clear, or as far-reaching).  And let us not forget that all those who do not accept Jesus as their God, Lord, and Savior are doomed for an eternity of fire and torture in Hell.  It is not a “misreading” or “taking out of context,” as these verses in favor of preserving the laws of the Old Testament are not parables, but crystal-clear affirmations.  After all, Christianity bases its entire legitimacy on fulfilling the prophecies of Jewish scripture and on the God of the Jews.

The Buried Ugly Truth of Early Christianity and Its Lessons for Today

It was the Christians who persecuted en masse, not the other way around; despite the popular image of Roman persecutions of Christians and feeding helpless mothers and children to the lions in the Colosseum, Nixey takes pains to point out that Roman persecutions of Christians were mostly few and far between, half-hearted and not widespread or intense, as low as “hundreds, not thousands” in their total victims, certainly far fewer than tradition has made it seem.  If Romans had really wanted to wipe out Christianity, it would not have been hard: the Bible would have been incredibly difficult and time-consuming to produce in those days, and a concerted effort to burn all the Bibles and silence the clergy would almost certainly have succeeded (indeed, later Christians would succeed in wiping out numerous other cults), and such success would have been an enormous obstacle for a religion based on the Word of God.

Yet for Christians then and too many of them now, like ISIS or even Trump’s Capitol insurrectionists, it is they themselves who feel they are and must be the victims and it is their victimhood that justifies their own extremism violent atrocities against innocents.  Whether it is Christian terrorists in America or Muslim or Jewish ones in the Middle East, the culture of victimhood elevates them and their narratives, to the exclusion of those they target.  In the end, the mentality of those who feel they must kill and destroy to preserve God’s will (really their own interests) reveals a pitifully weak “God” and a resentful, inferiority-complex-ridden class of warriors, traits consistent from the fourth century into the twenty-first.

It is for us, then, to remember these truths, even on a day like Christmas.  As perfectly articulated by the late and singular Christopher Hitchens:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Let us close on that note, remembering how many Roman “pagans” were made offers they could not refuse.  While it is undoubtedly true many people did convert to Christianity willingly and with a true heart, many others converted “willingly” from a threat of loss of status or their livelihood; many others from threat of torture, murder, or execution.  Many were tortured and executed, many did lose their jobs.  Many, under such conditions, would succumb and convert outwardly, if not in their hearts; many others who loved their children would have raised them as Christians so as to spare them constant harassment and violent threats.  Some would have simply done publicly the bare minimum to avoid legal trouble, others publicly genuinely worship Jesus as another god and privately still worship their own gods.

Still, so it is that in a few generations, most Romans were “Christians” in a place where being a pagan had literally become a death sentence.  Under such conditions, it is doubtful a majority of converts over time were genuine or truly willing, but many of their lives were snuffed out, their voices obliterated to history.  As John Chrysostom joyfully noted in somewhat exaggerated fashion in one sermon, the written works “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated;” in another, “Where is Plato?  Nowhere!  Where Paul?  In the mouths of all!”

More than we would have thought in remote parts of the now officially Christian Roman Empire, some “pagans” would have persisted in their traditional beliefs, quietly and illiterately.  But their world was dying out, their heyday long gone, they were the exception, not the norm, and they leave virtually no record.  The few words from “pagans” in their twilight are wholly depressing, often learned scholars living to see their teachings banned, their books burned, ignorance and credulity reign, knowing they are part of a world where the inmates have taken over the asylum.  For one Palladas, it is a time he and his kind were “men reduced to ashes… for today everything is turned upside down,” and he asks:

Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we [who worship the old gods]… Or are we alive and is life dead? (xxvi).

At least in Nixey’s if not Christianity’s account, they live on and their voices are heard and remembered.

Whatever the properly understood teachings of Christianity or any religion, let us hope that all faiths and faith leaders can one day insist on changing these rules to allow for complete tolerance and non-violence towards all other faiths and people of no faith such that no people today suffer the treatment of Nixey’s “pagans;” for even in recent years, Yazidis have suffered like this under ISIS, such that one Yazidi survivor turned Nobel laureate, Nadia Murad, wrote a memoir called The Last Girl, as in she hopes she is one of the last girls to go through such an attempted religious genocide.  In the same vein as Paul and the early Christians, ISIS saw Murad’s Yazidis as “pagans” and therefore Devil-worshippers; Christians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries would have been proud of ISIS for assaulting the “pagan” Yazidis (indeed, Islam has borrowed much from Christianity it would have been better off not). 

Perhaps Nixey’s narrative can remind us no faith or people is exempt from the possibility of such horrid conduct meted either by or against them, and can add to the possibility that Murad’s earnest, deeply necessary plea is heard.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), from the spring of 2020, excerpted and slightly condensed from America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus (itself an excerpt from a much larger piece) with a lengthy addendum written September 11, 2021; see related podcasts #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and #8: Col. T. X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.), on Strategic Failure in Afghanistan.

SILVER SPRING—In the eighties and nineties in Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

ADDENDUM: September 11, 2021: A year ago—hell, even a month ago—I would have agreed with the previous analysis by Gen. Petraeus.  And I would not have made a bad deal with the Taliban along the lines of the one made by Trump and Pompeo, nor reduced our troop strength from about 13,000 to 2,500 from the signing of that deal to the final days of my presidency as Trump did even as the Taliban flouted the deal and helped marginalize and severely weaken the Afghan government, setting up its collapse.  I am still processing President Biden’s withdrawal and Kabul Airlift, and my criticism of its tactics were much harsher at first than it is now, given revelations that have been trickling out since the Afghan government’s rapid collapse. 

I still think it would have been wiser for Biden to delay beginning the withdrawing of the final 2,500 U.S. troops until November 2021-March-2022 instead of April-August of this year (provided the Taliban would have kept to not attacking U.S. troops, a big and unknown “what-if”) to coincide with the winter instead of the fighting season, thereby minimizing the ability of the Taliban to make gains during the final phase of our pullout and also giving us more time to process SIVs (Special Immigrant Visas, the visas designed to get our most vetted Afghan allies and their families out of Afghanistan and into the U.S.) in an orderly manner, but the speed at which the house of cards that was the Afghan government collapsed—faster by far than any intelligence estimate had predicted, exposing the hollowness of our twenty years of investment in rebuilding and remaking Afghanistan, of building up security forces and a government—has changed my thinking.

Perhaps the writing was on the wall for a long time, for many years, but it should have been obvious back in September 2019, when only about 1.8 million people voted in Afghanistan’s 2019 presidential election out of nearly 9.7 million registered voters, down dramatically from some seven million who voted in the country’s 2014 presidential election.  Considering that the country’s population overall in 2019 was some 38 million, this made the voting crowd in 2019 less than five percent of the population (admittedly consisting of many children, but still), thus, both the degree to which Afghans were not buying into this American project and the degree to which those who had previously at least in part bought into were giving up tells you just how “successful” our strategy in Afghanistan had been (I am still not yet sure if we were doomed from the start, but Col. T. X. Hammes, USMC [Ret.] makes a strong case that we were in my recent podcast discussion with him).

While Gen. Petraeus was certainly right in a military sense, just as he was in claiming success for the Iraqi surge, like in the Iraqi surge, the military campaign in Afghanistan existed to give life and development to the political side of things in the host country, and in both cases, those raison d’êtres for Gen. Petraeus’s detailed counterinsurgency campaigns—giving local politics breathing room to work—did not result in anything near what we were hoping for, making our efforts to support the existing systems quite problematic.

Biden concluded bleakly that sending American sons and daughters to fight and die for a government that was not respected or thought of as legitimate, nor bought into by anything like a critical (let alone growing) mass of Afghans (indeed, that mass was shrinking) was a fool’s errand, however noble.

I was one of those fools in the sense that I assumed after two decades of effort that we had built up something in Afghanistan that was on a path to sustaining itself to at least some degree, that what we were building there would not immediately crumble without our support, that out support was worth it and integral to maintaining a level of “success,” and it is clear that I was not alone and in good company.

But we were wrong.

Instead, our servicemen and servicewomen—sometimes our diplomats, contractors, and aid workers, too—were putting themselves at risk and dying for a house of cards that was so corrupt and so empty it only took a few days to collapse in full once cities started falling to the Taliban.  Sure, the very real gains—for human rights and women’s rights, for a free press and economic development—mattered, and they existed robustly in the Kabul Bubble, other cities, and even in the form of girl’s schools in rural areas outside Taliban control (only about one-quarter of Afghanistan’s population lives in cities).  But especially those rural girls’ schools were often under threat, and almost all the gains were shallow in that the system set to preserve them was unwilling, perhaps unable, to do so if they had to fight the Taliban on their own.

I take, in part, the points made along the lines that the U.S. withdrawal deprived the Afghan security forces of the air support, intelligence support, logistics, and maintenance support provided by U.S. and other NATO forces and contractors.

And yet, last time I checked, the Taliban did not have an air force, satellite or drone intelligence, M4 and M16 rifles, body armor, any large number of heavy vehicles, or night-vision goggles (they later acquired many American guns, body armor, and night-vision goggles, but not as much U.S. equipment as some claim and not prior to the rapid collapse of the Afghan government).

If the Taliban can fight without these things, surely the better equipped Afghan Army could have, as well (except when they ran out of supplies, and the Afghan government officials obviously should have much more highly prioritized supplying their troops).  Essentially, the Taliban were fighting with AKs, pickup trucks, and in outfits that look to Westerners like pajamas, so I find any arguments that all the modern, high-tech, Western-supplied advances were necessary for the Afghan security forces to put up a fight hard to accept. 

Now, this is not to denigrate the bravery and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Afghan security forces who died fighting the Taliban, nor their numerous wounded.  But when push came to shove, in the final battle for the very concept of everything ideally embodied by their uniforms, so many cut deals with the Taliban and/or melted away that it is clear the Afghan government, including its security forces, was, ultimately, a failure, meaning the entire U.S. mission beyond going after al-Qaeda and bin Laden was also a failure.

So while I fault Biden and his team on timing and not responding faster to unfolding events (though when they did respond after hesitating for a few days, it seems they did a pretty good job in horrible circumstances), they were far from unreasonable in thinking the Afghan government would give them more time and breathing space given what our intelligence had assessed and, in the end, I cannot disagree with the decision to pull the plug even if I do not fully actively agree with it.  It is hard to disagree with the decision to end our involvement on the ground militarily, and it is often the hardest thing to admit failure and cut your losses, never a glorious, feel-good decision with glorious, feel-good results.

Just writing about this has made me feel even more hollow and resigned to all this, more emptiness at trying to ascertain any kind of grander meaning to 9/11 and its offspring, the “War on Terror.”  It was hard to feel more so in that direction, but here, then, is to one effect of the past twenty years that is indisputable.  Historically, there is not much to see here, just another example of a major power’s imperial overstretch, like Persia’s Thermopylae and Plataea, Rome’s Dacia, the Arab-led Caliphate at Tours, Hideyoshi’s Korea, the Ottoman’s Vienna, Napoleon in Russia, Russia’s Tsushima and Mukden.  Some of these hastened or finalized imperial decline, others (Dacia for Rome and Japan’s late sixteenth-century invasions of Korea) would just be temporary setbacks that did not precipitate a larger collapse, and those predicting Afghanistan is somehow America’s zenith before an inexorable decline seem wildly premature (indeed, Afghanistan was a remote outpost, not in any way a major support for any of the rest of the so-called American “Empire,” and in and of itself is not likely to cause America any serious issues overall).  But like these other failed imperial offensives, there will not be much to show for it.  And yet, unlike some of these other disasters, Biden leaving Afghanistan now will greatly limit the fallout for America and its allies (apart, sadly, from our Afghan allies).

So as much respect as I have for Gen. Petraeus and his service, in light of what has recently transpired and what has been revealed of late, after two decades—set against the backdrop of a conflict of perpetual civil war that was killing an increasing number of Afghan civilians (on pace for a record high in 2021 through the first six months) in a country with a government we built up and invested much into but that held little faith among its 38 million mostly rural people, with the authority of that government rarely existing or held in high esteem in most rural areas—the idea that the mission of our troops in Afghanistan propping up that government could be characterized as “reasonably successful” is a tough sell.

In a United States where the sacrifices of these troops and the mission they serve are given little deep thought by the public, in which the three major national television networks devoted only five collective total minutes out of some combined 14,000 on their flagship nightly news broadcasts in all of 2020 to the war, and in which most Americans had given up on the war years ago, there may be some intellectual grounds to celebrate the decision to leave, but otherwise celebration seems a perverse notion.  As I watch the 9/11 ceremony at New York’s Ground Zero even as I write this, it is clear the memories of the terrorist attack’s fallen are still raw, wounds still unhealed, even twenty years later.  The exact same can be said for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans whose untimely ends likewise haunt their loved ones.

Rather than look away, we should wallow in the misery of our mistakes, lest we repeat them.  But repeating our mistakes seems to be a cultural hallmark of late.  That we do this, that we sparked invasions that killed far more people than died from 9/11, that our nation is now as fractured and torn apart as any time since our horrific Civil War, is in no way honoring the dead of 9/11.  We owe them—our victims and the victims we created—more, far more than our collective sum total of our actions since that fateful day twenty years ago. 

I wrote of those sacred obligations years ago, but we still have yet to fulfill them (hell, it took a comedian, Jon Stewart, to begin to get first responders to the 9/11 attacks the support they needed).  What has happened to us, what we have done, since 9/11 is still solidly a net negative, and I noted this obvious truth years ago.  That ugliness is today only getting worse.

I wish with all my heart and soul I had something more positive than that to leave you with on this day, but that is all I’ve got, my heart and soul deeply colored by the actions we have undertaken over the past twenty years, many of which—despite many individual noble deeds of love, selflessness, and sacrifice embodied by firefighters running into burning towers and Marines taking babies over an airport wall in Kabul as terrorists targeted them—should fill our hearts and souls with shame, regardless of intentions.  In the end, what counts most is results, and Afghanistan should be a humbling lesson for all Americans, as should be the “War on Terror” and our whole reaction to 9/11 itself, an era the unfulfilling results of which for which we all bear some level of blame.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article The Kabul Airlift in Light of the Berlin Airlift: Surprising Parallels and Important Lessons

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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Eighth Episode (Afghanistan Special #2) on the overall big-picture, strategic failure of the U.S. in Afghanistan with special guest Col. T.X. Hammes, USMC (Ret.), with thirty years in the Marine Corp performing a wide variety of roles and today a noted scholar on military history, tactics, and strategy with a PhD from Oxford

PLEASE like, share, and subscribe if you enjoy this episode!

Content edited for clarity and quality

Notes

2015 book chapter by Col. Hammes: “Raising and Mentoring Security Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq”

Col. Hammes’s books/chapters/articles:

Books:

The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century

Forgotten Warriors: The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, the Corps Ethos, and the Korean War

Deglobalization and International Security

Other relevant content authored by the Col.-

“Technological Change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution”

The Melians’ Revenge

more coming soon

Other informations/sources of relevance: (more coming soon)

A Military History of Afghanistan From the Great Game to the Global War on Terror by Ali Ahmad Jalali

Long War Journal’s interactive Taliban control map 2000-2021

CRS report on Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Programs

My related article, America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus, discussing the big-picture failures of America’s Afghanistan project

My graduate school paper from late 2009 advising, in a simulated memo, President Obama on Afghanistan policy

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here)!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 25, 2021 (updated August 26 to discuss the terrorist attacks near the airport); see related podcast The Real Context News Podcast #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and related articles 9/11, Afghanistan, and the “War on Terror”: The Long View (& the Tragic One) and America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus

SILVER SPRING—The situation looked grim.  Wholly surrounded by a grim, much-feared, terror-inducing-and-utilizing hostile power and deep in the territory that power’s forces controlled, the U.S. military and its allies found itself with few options and many thousands of civilians in its care, dependent on U.S. assistance not just for aid but for survival.  The crisis had developed amidst a massive regional military withdrawal, with the current American presidential administration finding itself in shock, surprised that its foe would be in the position it was in at this time in a way that caught America and its allies at a distinct disadvantage and clearly without plans in motion that anticipated the current debacle.  The key U.S. planners and decision-makers had clearly underestimated the boldness of their foe and the speed with which it would act and succeed; earlier, more urgent warnings were not heeded in full.  And while the U.S. and this foe had not and were not engaged in direct hostilities in this time period, the tension was suffocating and combat seemed ready to erupt at any provocation.  Civilians were not so lucky and had found themselves targeted and caught in the standoff, their future uncertain and looking grim.  Would their American occupiers-turned protectors stand by them?  Or would they be abandoned to the cruel depredations of a sinister foe driven by an extremist ideology?

This description could easily apply to the situation today faced by U.S. President Joe Biden at Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai International Airport on the outskirt’s Kabul, the country’s capital city, describing the situation of the U.S., its military allies, and Afghan civilians in an island of U.S. control amidst a sea of terrorist Taliban-controlled territory, but it would just as aptly describe the situation faced in June 1948 by one of Biden’s predecessors, Harry Truman, in Germany’s divided capital of Berlin, with West Berlin an island of U.S., British, and French control amidst a sea of Communist Soviet-controlled territory.

Obviously, there are key differences: the Soviet Union and the Taliban are hardly equivalents, and we had been allied to one and in a longstanding war with another; Germany is not Afghanistan, whether culturally or in its location; 1948 is not 2021; in one situation we were bringing in supplies to save at-risk civilians and to maintain our own position and in the other, we are trying to get people out from a position we are not trying to maintain after this evacuation; and the overall geopolitics leading to each are quite different in many respects.

Nevertheless, the tactical similarities are striking and deserve examination.

Two Dire Situations

Since the end of WWII, Germany had been divided by the victorious Allies into a Soviet zone in the east and American, British, and French zone in the West, with Germany’s capital of Berlin also similarly divided into four occupation zones: the Soviets in a large zone in what would be known as East Berlin, and the American, British, and French zones in what would be known as West Berlin. Some of the major issues that helped set up the possibility of the Berlin crisis arose much earlier, from oversights in planning and negotiations going all the way back to during WWII itself, under the previous presidential administration.  And it was in the fall of 1947 that Gen. Lucius Clay, the U.S. Military Governor for Germany, warned that the Soviets might go as far as to force the West out of Berlin, but, as historian Wilson Miscamble noted, “no precautions were taken nor were contingency plans made in Washington.”  When the U.S. Army’s Planning and Operations (P&O) Division put together in January 1948 a study of options in the face of Soviet aggression, its recommendation in the event of a full blockade was to try to remain in the city as long as supply would allow but to eventually evacuate.  Gen. Clay even warned on March 5, 1948, of the “dramatic suddenness” with which war could come, yet this sparked not attempts to shore up a weak U.S. position but only evacuations of family members of American staff and a discussion in the Army section of the Pentagon of withdrawing from Berlin.  The Secretary of the Army did not think the U.S. could stay if the Soviets applied significant pressure; Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradly in April echoed this with a lack of confidence the U.S. was prepared to fight to stay in Berlin, and had even that month suggested withdrawing from Berlin in response to a temporary crisis then over Soviet inspections of U.S. trains supplying Berlin.  The French wanted to leave Berlin entirely.

Even Gen. Clay, though, did not think that the Soviets would engage in a full blockade for fear of hurting their standing among the German people.  The leadership of both the Army and the State Department did not feel a Soviet blockade was likely, either, while the CIA on May 12 only warned of “further gradual tightening of Soviet restrictions” and even expressed as late as June 17 confidence that the Soviets wanted to improve relations with the West.  Other top officials thought the Soviets would apply pressure on the West to leave Berlin only over time and gradually.  Truman himself was focused on a tight Democratic primary, 1948 being a presidential election year.

Unsure if it would even stay in Berlin, the U.S. did not anticipate nor act to deter the Soviets from enacting a full blockade.  Thus, Truman and his team were caught off-guard after the Soviets imposed a full blockade on the Western sectors of Berlin late on the night of June 23, just a week after the CIA released an intelligence estimate that in no way predicted anything like a full blockade in a week.  Already low on supplies in a Berlin that was still mostly bombed-out ruins, the Germans living in the Western zones would start suffering in a few days, seriously so within two weeks, without access to new supplies.  Military and civilian planners, intelligence officials, and the president himself had failed to anticipate what was happening, and on June 24, the U.S., its allies, and the civilians under its control woke up and found themselves in dire straits, facing an entirely predictable but imminently looming disaster with very few options and the possibility of miscalculation or war erupting from even one wrong move tremendous.

This is remarkably similar to the situation the Biden Administration, its allies, and those civilians depending on the U.S. found themselves on August 14.  The Biden Administration had similar warnings that the security situation was dire, that preparations should be accelerated, and that Afghan security forces were not likely to last long and that government could collapse quickly, though, to quote U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff Gen. Mark Milley, “there was nothing…that indicated a collapse of this army and this government [Afghan] in eleven days” and it was blindsided like the Truman Administration was in 1948.  Those on Biden’s team, too, had to feel out and develop their approach and see how their foe would respond, and have made progress even with a lack of clarity and much confusion.

Yet the awful precariousness and desperation of the situation in Berlin on June 24, 1948, the miscalculations and missteps in the run-up to that moment, the terror of Berliners in Western zones, are barely remembered today; instead, the wildly successful outcome of the Truman Administration’s response, the bravery of American pilots, and the logistical miracle of the Berlin Airlift are remembered much more than the Berlin Blockade.

Here, history can be both instructive and provide hope.

Feeling through the Dark in Berlin

Truman’s top staff, even after the Berlin Airlift began in full on June 26th, did not know how things would unfold, did not know what U.S. policy would be over time, did not know what they would do in the event of a Soviet attack, remained divided on Berlin, and were often just trying their best to react to rapidly unfolding events.  The U.S., Britain, and France were divided with each other on Berlin policy, too.  Truman’s top advisors were still deciding if they wanted to stay in Berlin or leave when Truman communicated his (apparently “tentative” and “provisional”) decision (to stay), without much discussion, on June 28, but debate on this within his team would continue for months and Truman’s own tentative nature of the firm short-term commitment he made indicated he wanted to see how things would play out over time.

Over the coming weeks, Truman struck a precarious balance between acting forcefully to protect Americans, Western allies, and German civilians in West Berlin while also trying to avoid provoking the wily, nefarious, hard-to-predict Soviets or sparking military escalation.  The Airlift was even seen as a compromise, risk-averse, time-buying, temporary measure—one that lacked support from key U.S. military leaders—until late July, when Truman decided to make it a longer-standing policy; before then, the situation was characterized by uncertainty and anxiety, with Truman’s public and private statements offering some clarity for various present moments but not on general policy, leaving anything save the near-term future ambiguous.  And for some time—until January 1949—the Airlift fell short of what was needed to properly supply Berlin (one can only imagine how today’s media would decry this as a “failure” and focus on the shortages in Berlin, where households that winter of 1948-1949 had only one hour of electricity per day each).

It is important to note this suffering and the setbacks, and while the Berlin Airlift was messy, uncertain, and ad hoc, in the end, it worked out incredibly well for the U.S., its allies, and West Berliners, with the Berliners themselves particularly determined to hold out.  In hindsight especially, in a situation that was extremely tense that could serve as a catalyst for a full-blown conventional or even a nuclear war, instead of committing outright to high-risk policies, Truman allowing things to develop and to react as the developments occurred proved to be the safer, sounder middle course, despite the desire of many—including some of Truman’s top advisors—for firm positions, clear answers, and long-term clarity.

The Real Achievement in Kabul

Today, the press should not expect Biden to have all the answers, either; he, too, is responding to a rapidly developing, precarious, and uncertain situation and has to engage a wily, nefarious, hard-to-predict Taliban; he, like Truman before him, wants to avoid any military escalation.  But the Biden Administration and its allies still have options, with thousands of troops and their highest level of focus and energy bearing down upon the situation in Kabul as the Kabul Airlift is in full swing.

Yet much of the media—which barely, and I mean barely, covered Afghanistan in recent years)—ABC, NBC, and CBS devoted a collective measly five minutes to Afghanistan in all of 2020 on their main evening news broadcasts out of over 14,000 minutes of those programs’ total news coverage)—is pronouncing Biden’s withdrawal execution a failure (“total,” “complete”), inviting many of the people who botched America’s foray into Afghanistan over two decades, even those who negotiated or supported the terrible Trump Administration’s withdrawal agreement with the Taliban to hypocritically chime in along the same lines (a notable exception is Trump’s own former National Security Advisor, Gen. H.R. McMaster, who likens the deal to the Munich appeasement of Hitler).

While it is undeniable that there were disastrous tactical calculations and mistakes made during the past weeks and months, the media is mainly trapped in the mentality of August 14, when things seemed disastrous and any serious adjustments, fixes, or mitigating responses from the Biden Administration were not apparent.  Back in 1948, the press basically had daily print editions and radio/TV broadcasts at most few times a day, no twenty-four-hour news coverage, no mobile phones with video cameras, no Twitter, no Internet.  Coverage was less focused on details and anecdotes but on putting together a bigger picture, a task that I have repeatedly noted our current media struggles to accomplish. 

And that current press is missing the massive, increasing success of the Kabul Airlift.

Some numbers that do not lie: in the eleven days from fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 14-15 through August 24, the U.S.-led operation has evacuated some 82,300 people—mostly Afghans—from Hamid Karzai International Airport, including:

• some 7,800 on Saturday
• an incredible 10,400 by the U.S. military and 5,900 by coalition aircraft on Sunday (over 16,000 in one day and well over 27,000 in the two-and-a-half days from mid-Friday through Sunday)
• a further, even more staggering 21,600 people on Monday (12,700 on U.S. military flights and 8,900 on coalition flights)
• a similarly massive 19,000 on Tuesday (11,200 on U.S. military flights and 7,800 by coalition craft)
• the four-and-a-half-day total from mid-Friday through Tuesday is close to 68,000 people (40,600 from Monday-Tuesday alone)
• including those evacuated through the airport since late July, the operation has flown out from the airport some 87,900 since late July

And all this has been accomplished with zero U.S. casualties.* (see 8/26 update at end)

Let that sink in.  This is a remarkable achievement, especially considering the extreme circumstances and the rapid adjustments and moves required to make this happen, for which Biden, his team, and those operating on the ground in Kabul deserve much credit.

If we can meet this accelerated pace from the last seventy-two hours or even close over the next week, and assuming much of the final day or two would have to be prioritized for removing U.S. troops and coalition military and diplomatic forces, that would be roughly 70,000 to perhaps as many as 160,000 or more additional people evacuated by August 31, the just-yesterday reaffirmed apparent (but still apparently flexible) deadline chosen by Biden.  That would be roughly 120,000-220,000 total, but this presumes safe and free passage to the airport for Afghans trying to leave and recent developments have severely complicated this issue (more on that later).  Still, this has the potential to be one of the most remarkable humanitarian logistical feats since the Berlin Airlift (in many ways, it already is), and the media should at least recognize this hopeful possibility alongside the peril of a far worse possible outcome; if the possibility of ISIS-affiliate (ISIS Khorasan, or ISIS-K) attacks deserve being reported (and it does), then so, too, does the possibility of successfully getting out 100,000 to 200,000 or more people fleeing the Taliban, especially when the evacuations have been impressive, quickly increasing, and successful thus far.

Soviet Lessons for the Taliban

The Taliban, too, can also learn from history: the Soviet leadership, even under a man like Joseph Stalin who reigned through terror, realized that to interfere or attack these humanitarian flights would be a public relations disaster worse in scale than the circumstances they were imposing on Americans, their allies, and German civilians in West Berlin.  The Soviets were untrustworthy, extremists, and not afraid to use brutal violence on a massive scale.  And yet, they knew they had to some degree win hearts and minds and not appear to be a terrible, bad-faith actor on the world stage; they knew they had to govern in the territory they had newly acquired and, still recovering from a long, brutal war, they did not want to alienate the international community.

Understandably, then, the Soviets in the end decided it was in their own interests not to be seen stopping the Berlin Airlift and to eventually, eleven months later, end the Berlin Blockade on May 12, 1949.

The U.S.-led Western allies were able to leverage their superior economic might to impose their own blockade on Soviet-occupied eastern Germany, a major factor in the Soviet decision to relent in their blockade of Berlin.  This type of leverage is something today’s U.S.-led Western allies could easily exert if the Taliban interfere with the Kabul Airlift; the Taliban’s leaders—desperate for acceptance, recognition, and aid from the very institutions run and dominated by the U.S. and its allies—know this and know their requests for the West to engage with them, maintain and increase aid programs, and further economic ties with an Afghanistan under their control will fall on deaf ears should they not allow the Kabul Airlift to proceed and or even engage in violence against the operation or those trying to reach it.

Today’s geopolitical situation is actually surprisingly similar, then, to 1948 in a few crucial aspects: facing a stark imbalance similar to that faced by the Soviet Union in 1948, the Taliban today surround the Western position in question and are in a far superior military position locally even as it is in a far weaker position economically and diplomatically.  Both the U.S. today knows and in 1948 knew that the eyes of the world are and were on the crisis, that global public opinion is and was with their mission, and that judgment of their enemies would be harsh if those enemies thwarted that mission.  Today, the Taliban is capable of bluster and threats much like the Soviets, to be sure, but also like the Soviets with the Berlin Airlift and their occupation zone in Germany, the leaders of Taliban will find their movement’s position on the ground and ability to work with the world to rebuild the Afghanistan they just have taken over will be better off with the Kabul Airlift succeeding than with them derailing it.

It was hardly a love-fest between the Soviets and the West in a divided Germany after the Berlin Airlift—not long after, West and East Germany, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, were created—but peace has been in place in Germany ever since, all of Germany saw a massive recovery from WWII, and WWIII was averted.  Both the West and Soviets were able to maintain their positions, but, in the end, though it took decades, the repression of the Soviets and failure of their imposed system resulted in a lack of popular support and a desire and eventual reality of East Germans reuniting with West Germany under the free and democratic West German system, not the repressive Soviet model running on extremist ideology. 

The Taliban, far less powerful in 2021 in Afghanistan than the Soviets were in Germany in 1948, should also take heed from this lesson if it hopes to avoid resistance, revolution, and overthrow.  And, unlike Truman in 1948, Biden in 2021 is not even contemplating staying, so there is even less incentive for the Taliban than for the Soviets to interfere or attack the airlift operation, which even the Soviets did not do back then.

Despair and Hope in a Dance

The media is right to point out the mistakes made by Biden and his team in the past weeks and months, and if the Biden Administration fails to evacuate a significant number of Americans or Afghan allies who were not stuck behind Taliban lines in the weeks and months before the fall of Kabul, that will still be a disgrace, each individual left behind a failure of the Administration in and of itself.  But the press should also recognize the remarkable achievement that the Kabul Airlift is becoming and will hopefully firmly be remembered as—in addition to recognizing the clear parallels to the Berlin Airlift—provided our leaders see this mission through to a proper completion. 

And that is where things get a lot more complicated: it is altogether too easy to have a sinking feeling that we will fall far short of evacuating everyone we should be able to get out, leaving tens of thousands behind, that something really bad will happen.  It is easy to feel despair when you read yesterday that the Taliban is announcing a policy of blocking Afghans from the airport road, a policy that, if enforced robustly, will make it extremely difficult to extract many more Afghans; they are legitimately worried about a “brain drain,” but one cannot help worry that this stems at least as much from a desire to keep those who helped us from escaping, to mete out their barbaric sense of justice not just on our allies but also their families.  Should this happen, the grave earlier missteps of the Biden Administration will haunt Biden, the Kabul Airlift, and the whole Afghanistan war, should haunt all Americans and the world. 

And yet, there are reasons to still hope even with the latest developments.  It is easy to also feel a sense of American pride in how many tens of thousands of people we have gotten out so far, in how quickly we ramped up evacuations in just the past few days.  Unimpeded, there is so much more we can still do, so many more we can save, with our evacuation operation running amazingly smoothly and hitting a peak.  And there is apparently broad bipartisan support in Congress for extending the mission if necessary to get as many of our Afghan allies out as we can.

Set against this will to get the job done, there is now also a very real, breaking, specific, imminent threat from the aforementioned local ISIS affiliate, which intelligence indicates is seeking to attack civilians—American and Afghan—clustered outside the airport gates.

Knowing that just this past Monday our own CIA chief William Burns met in person in Kabul with de facto Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar (released from a Pakistani prison at the strong urging of the Trump Administration in 2018), there is clearly high-level intelligence sharing going on between the U.S. and the Taliban, a mortal enemy of ISIS.  In this context, it seems even more understandable that the Taliban would want to avoid having chaotic mobs of many thousands of Afghans interspersed with foreign nationals, including Americans, clogging the airport road and the areas outside the airport gates making an all-too-tempting target for ISIS suicide bombers, mortars, or any other manner of deadly attacks.  The U.S., obviously, wants to avoid this, too.  Ending the war with such scenes of terrorism and carnage, with people packed so tightly that casualties would undoubtedly be high, and putting Afghan civilians, American civilians, and American soldiers at such risk, would be irresponsible.  Neither the Taliban nor the U.S. wants ISIS attacks to succeed, so maybe most of the reason for the Taliban banning Afghans from trying to run the gauntlet of the airport road, especially after the chaos and crushing deaths there from earlier, but it would be irresponsible to not consider it likely that they also want to just keep U.S. allies from escaping their sick sense of justice.

Still, given this context of intelligence sharing and of the imminent ISIS action, and give the obvious reality that the U.S. is applying constant diplomatic pressure, that negotiations with the Taliban are constant and ongoing, that Biden did vow to get all the Americans and SIVs and their dependents out, that the U.S. (as discussed) has tremendous leverage over the Taliban, that a tremendous amount of pressure will be placed on the Taliban to allow the right Afghans safe passage to the airport and in a robust flow once security conditions allow, and that Biden himself yesterday said, announcing his intention to adhere to the August 31 deadline, that keeping to that deadline

depends upon the Taliban continuing to cooperate and allow access to the airport for those who were transport-—we’re transporting out and no disruptions to our operations.  In addition, I’ve asked the Pentagon and the State Department for contingency plans to adjust the timetable should that become necessary.  I’m determined to ensure that we complete our mission — this mission.

This gives me a lot of hope, even if security dictates a winding down of the U.S. military operation, that Biden, as a man of history and with the Berlin Airlift as inspiration, really will come up with one or more workable alternative if that is what is necessary to, as he said, “complete the mission.”  Nothing is certain yet other than what has already transpired—the bad and the ugly, but also the good.  We should all feel a sense of dread but also cautious hope, as the Biden Administration’s efforts, even after severe mistakes and setbacks and in sometimes anarchic and frenzied conditions filled with danger and uncertainty, have gotten over well over 82,000 people out in eleven days (that number is sure to grow) with zero U.S. casualties (that number is not sure to grow).* (see 8/26 update at end)  

To paraphrase the military historian Daniel Harrington, the very real confusion, lack of clarity, and hesitation during the Berlin Blockade are not among what we remember today; the symbolism of American defiance and determination resulting in a triumph against the odds in the Berlin Airlift are.  With so much yet to unfold, it is still quite possible that the Kabul Airlift may end well and succeed in evacuating a tremendous amount of people mostly without incident even after the initial disastrous missteps, that the U.S. might succeed in withdrawing with honor and staying true to most of our citizens and allies.

One other major legacy of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift: that German troops are currently serving and fighting alongside U.S. troops as NATO partners in Afghanistan deployed to the airport at the heart of the current 2021 Kabul Airlift.  Even with all the justified dread, this fact, too, can inspire and remind us all that there is still a real chance for this operation to go down in history as a resounding success.  No one—not those in the media, not us, not President Biden’s allies, not his political enemies—should prematurely conclude that this mission is a failure or a success yet; time remains, with reasons to fear but also reasons to hope.  As Biden is fond of quoting the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, let me leave you with his words:

History says / Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.

UPDATE: 8/26 2:30 PM U.S. EST: The awful carnage we were all hoping would be avoided has transpired in what is apparently an ISIS-K attack that has killed and wounded dozens of Afghans and Americans: at least sixty afghans and four U.S. Marines are dead, many people injured. This carnage is heartbreaking, and reminds us that the theme there really is despair dancing with hope. Yet how this mission will end remains to be seen: there is still the possibility for the mission to continue and evolve and move on to new phases, to still get many, many thousands more out, to do so with minimal casualties, to finish by and large as a historic success. One day, one attack can and will not define the overall character of the mission; the mission in its totality and how we finish it, though, will, and this still remains to be seen. Let us hope for the best and dismiss those making facile conclusions about an ongoing mission.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related podcast The Real Context News Podcast #7: Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.) on the U.S. Withdrawal & Our Duty to Our Afghan Allies and related article America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Seventh Episode (Afghanistan Special #1) on the execution of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and especially how it affects the mission to get our brave Afghan allies out of the country and away from a Taliban that may kill them, with special guest Col. Steve Miska, U.S. Army (Ret.), a leader of this effort to do right by our Afghan allies, who served on the National Security Council under President Obama and who wrote Baghdad Underground Railroad: Saving American Allies in Iraq.

PLEASE like, share, and subscribe if you enjoy this episode!

Correction: the last U.S. military combat deaths were in February 2020

Notes

How to Help:

NGOs/charities/agencies helping get allied Afghans, Iraqis out and/or resettle:

• No One Left Behind
• Vets for American Ideals
• Miry’s List
• International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)
• Evacuate Our Allies (EAO)
• UNCHR list of U.S. refugee resettlement agencies

One-page “How Can You Help?” fact-sheet mentioned in podcast

American citizens: contact your senators and congressmen

Col Miska’s (e-)book: available at Amazon; Barnes & Noble

Other info:

White paper by Miska et al. Soft Networks: Protecting an Achilles Heel of American Influence mentioned during podcast

Long War Journal’s interactive Taliban control map (present and over time)

Letter from 16 veterans’ organizations representing over 3 million people urging fastest possible processing of Afghans’ visa application

Truman Center report: Special Immigrant Visa: Call for Cooperative Action (April 2021)

Video of the chaos at Kabul’s airport (graphic if not bloody)

Article on U.S. not notifying Afghan allies at Bagram Air Base of U.S. withdrawal from Bagram

Like Col. Miska, I, too, noted we should not have withdrawn during the fighting season but the winter off-season

On anchor species, used as an analogy by Col. Miska to compare to U.S. support personnel in Afghanistan

On the importance of support personnel for militaries (tooth-to-tail ratio)

CRS report on Iraqi and Afghan Special Immigrant Visa Programs

Former President Trump’s National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster on Trump’s 2020 “peace deal” with Taliban being Munich-like “appeasement”

My related article, America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus, discussing the big-picture failures of America’s Afghanistan project

My graduate school paper from late 2009 advising, in a simulated memo, President Obama on Afghanistan policy

Consider donating if you appreciate this content (but only if you’ve donated to one of the orgs mentioned above helping in the crisis discussed herein. Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here)!

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means. In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. Thus, as our current coronavirus pandemic has many implications for bioterrorism and biowarfare, so, too, should the below analysis offer much food for thought on biodefense in the coronavirus era.

1.) A Brief History of America in Unconventional, Asymmetric Conflict

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, whether they were white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960s.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

2.) UNDERSTANDING OUR FAILURE AGAINST NONTRADITIONAL THREATS AND HOW THAT RELATES TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often be too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

Conclusion

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.  You can practically substitute “coronavirus” for “Iraq” or “Vietnam” and the same analysis would often apply.

When confronting potentially difficult and long struggles, yes, there is something to be said for optimism and a can-do spirit, but not being straight-up with the American people about the potential costs, pitfalls, and durations of major threats—whether pandemics or insurgencies—sets America up to have little appetite or commitment when things turn out much tougher than advertised and also erodes our government’s overall credibility and our trust in, and willingness to listen to, it.  These combine to set us up for failure and far more painful struggles because we do not set ourselves up with the right approach in the beginning, and, as we know with so much in life, starting off on the wrong foot only makes everything that comes after that much more difficult.  False hope births a false sense of security and only makes us more vulnerable, whether we are talking about our soldiers in Iraq or our citizens being out in public catching coronavirus, unafraid of a spreading pandemic because leaders did not signify the appropriate level of concern people should have by not ordering lockdowns early.

Now, because of early missteps, our experience with COVID-19 is going to look more like the Iraq War than the Gulf War.  Therefore, as we try to overcome this threat, understanding our past missteps and failures against unconventional, asymmetric threats is crucial.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter(you can follow me there at @bfry1981) April 20, 2014 (published October 21)

“Go, now, attack Amalek, and put under the ban everything he has. Do not spare him; kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

–1 Samuel 15:3

When discussing religion and terrorism, I find myself most drawn to the arguments of Christopher Hitchens. He does not make the claim that religion is the root of all evil, just that it “poisons everything.”[1] At least when it comes to terrorism, I think it apt to say that religion “poisons” an already noxious phenomenon and makes it far worse.

Entire papers can be written on what “terrorism” actually is, but for simplicity’s sake let us use what is the fairly standard definition: violent acts carried out by non-state actors with some larger motivation besides just simple murder. Of course, on its simplest level, terrorism is murder, pure and simple. And yet, a suicide bomber who blows himself up in a rival sect’s or religion’s house of worship cannot be said to have the same motivations as a man who kills his wife for cheating on him. Defining religion, especially for some of the academically inclined, can also prove to be problematic. And yet when most people talk about religion, they will not usually have to explain the term “religion,” it is just understood, just as most adherents of a particular faith will have an answer as to what it means to be an adherent of that particular faith even if they have little or no understanding of the complex theology behind this faith. So we will leave semantic debates to the religion scholars and start with a simple definition most people would agree upon, that “[r]eligions are belief systems that suppose the existence of supernatural entities capable of effecting changes in the natural world and typically serve as gatekeepers to life after death.”[2]

Even without terrorism in the mix, religion can encourage more extreme violence in unique—and uniquely powerful—ways. It has been found through repeated studies that “religious fundamentalists, who are most committed to unwavering obedience to the values of their faith, tend to be high in prejudice, ethnocentrism, and support for violent solutions to international conflicts.”

Even without terrorism in the mix, religion can encourage more extreme violence in unique—and uniquely powerful—ways. It has been found through repeated studies that “religious fundamentalists, who are most committed to unwavering obedience to the values of their faith, tend to be high in prejudice, ethnocentrism, and support for violent solutions to international conflicts.” Studies also show that “exposing American Christians to verses from the Bible that condone or glorify violence increased their aggressive behavior [even] in the laboratory,” and that “Christian fundamentalists were especially supportive of extreme military policies under all conditions but one.”[3] This is not to suggest that religion is incapable of inspiring good in people, just that it most certainly also capable of inspiring the very worst in humanity, regardless of the fact that many would argue that the interpretations of those inclined to violence are not the “correct” interpretations of whatever religion it is that they are discussing.

When thrown together, terrorism and religion seem to mutually reinforce a negative intensity in each other. As one relatively recent study of suicide terrorism notes, today “[m]ost suicide attacks today are perpetrated by terrorist groups that adhere to a radical Salafi [Muslim] jihadist ideology.” And, while religion is not the singular cause per se, this religious “[i]deology plays an important role, however, in helping reduce the suicide attacker’s reservations to perpetrate the acts of killing and dying. It helps the suicide bomber justify his or her actions and to disengage morally from his act and his victims.” Even in the case of a group like the mainly Hindu Tamil Tigers, which has engaged in particularly deadly suicide bombings against the mainly Buddhist government of Sri Lanka for decades and that does not proclaim religion as the primary influence on its organization and in its struggle, religion still plays a large role in both the organization and in the deadly violence between factions in Sri Lanka.[4] Thus, here we can see that religion makes terrorism worse.[5]

Even in the mid-1990s, Bruce Hoffman, noted terrorism expert, was able to discuss the higher lethality from religiously motivated terrorism as compared to non-religiously motivated terrorism. The events of the past two decades would only reinforce what was then already apparent to him. As Hoffman notes, “[f]or the religious terrorist, violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or divine duty, executed in direct response to some theological demand or imperative. Religion, therefore, functions as a legitimising force, sanctioning, if not encouraging, wide-scale violence against an almost open-ended category of opponents,” and this contributes to the “higher levels of lethality” in “terrorism motivated by a religious imperative.”[6] Referring to the failed attempt by religiously motivated terrorists to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993, Hoffman notes that none of the big-name secular terrorists of the previous decade ever had as their goal to bring down an entire high-rise office building packed with civilians.

Another relatively recent study looks at a broad range of terrorist attacks that occurred between 1998 and 2005. It found that “[r]eligious and ethnonationalist organizations kill more than religious organizations (though the difference between the two is not conclusively different from zero), which kill more than leftist, ethnonationlist, and all others, regardless of size or connections,” that overall, “[r]eligious groups kill much more than nonreligious groups,” and that “[e]ight of the 10 most lethal groups (and 15 of the top 20)…are all classified as religious or religious and ethnonationalist in orientation.”[7]

If you just think a bit about terrorism in the modern era, you can draw your own clear conclusions without needing to rely on sophisticated academic studies to understand something meaningful about the relationship between religion and terrorism. During the Cold War, much of the major terrorism of the world consisted of small and relatively less lethal attacks by the Irish Republican Army, with a car bomb here and there; of attacks and hostage-taking by leftist groups in Europe; of the fairly secular PLO hijacking a plane here or there, or some occasional shootings. Contrast that with the suicide bombings of Hezbollah (translation: “Party of God”), Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Tamil Tigers, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. While these groups are each unique and different from each other, they nevertheless have some common denominators involving religion. In particular, the bombings of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their affiliates leave nothing sacred, as mosques, churches, funerals, weddings, girls’ schools, and religious processions have been the intended targets of their violence for a decade now, and after the 9/11 attacks, constitute some of the most lethal terrorist attacks in human history, attacks which have killed tens of thousands since 9/11 alone. As religion becomes more front and center in the sectarian conflicts of the post-Cold War era, the lethality of terror attacks has only increased, not decreased, the targets and carnage more horrific, not less. Religion did not inherently create the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places. But these studies make it clear that religion has definitely made these attacks worse. And studies or no studies, anyone can simply read the news headlines from past decades and compare them to stories from the last decade, and it will easily be understood that the current, more religiously motivated terrorism is deadlier in its body count and considers not even houses or worship or children as off limits in terms of their being designated, deliberate targets.

As religion becomes more front and center in the sectarian conflicts of the post-Cold War era, the lethality of terror attacks has only increased, not decreased, the targets and carnage more horrific, not less.

Thus, while religion may or may not poison everything, we should at least be able to agree with Mr. Hitchens that religion does, in fact, poison terrorism.

*****

[1] Hitchens, Christopher, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, (New York: Twelve Hachette Book Group, 2009), passim.

[2] Vail, K. E., Z. K. Rothschild, D. R. Weise, S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski, and J. Greenberg, “A Terror Management Analysis 0f The Psychological Functions Of Religion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14, no. 1 (2010): 84-94, 84.

[3] Ibid., 89-90.

[4] Roberts, Michael, “Saivite Symbols, Sacrifice, and Tamil Tiger Rites,” Social Analysis49, no. 1 (2005): 67-93, passim.

[5] Moghadam, Assaf, “Motives For Martyrdom: Al-Qaida, Salafi Jihad, And The Spread Of Suicide Attacks,” International Security 33, no. 3 (2009): 46-78, 76.

[6] Hoffman, Bruce, “Holy Terror: An Act of Divine Duty” The World Today 52, no. 3 (March, 1996): 79-81, 79.

[7] Asal, Victor, and R. Karl Rethemeyer, “The Nature Of The Beast: Organizational Structures And The Lethality Of Terrorist Attacks,” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 02 (2008): 437-449, 446.