An interesting work on Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Afghanistan recently came to my attention.  Frank L. Holt’s Into the Land of Bones gives a fast-paced account of the young Macedonian king’s counterinsurgency operations in the Hindu Kush and Central Asia.  The book was published in 2005, when Afghanistan was still upheld as the model of democracy-building in the Muslim world, and the US effort there was practically considered a victory. Into the Land of Bones, however, evinces no such enthusiasm, and rightly so. Holt, a scholar of Hellenistic Bactria, provides us with the context of history both ancient and more recent to show how foreign attempts to subdue the region are all but fated to come to grief.

“All these (British, Soviet and US) invasions of Afghanistan went well at first, but so far no superpower has found a workable alternative to what might be called the recipe for ruin in Afghanistan:

1. Estimate the time and resources necessary to conquer and control the region.
2. Double all estimates.
3. Repeat as needed.” (p. 18)

Geography and culture are the two permanent features that make Afghanistan ungovernable. When Alexander invaded Bactria in pursuit of Persian rebels in 330 B.C., he found the mountainous wasteland and isolated, feuding tribes that would accurately sum up the country today.  Warlords, then known as hyparchs, would seemingly submit and then take up their rebellion again at the first opportunity.  While Alexander did found new colonies (among them Kandahar and Bagram), the Macedonian army was engaged in a grinding, bloody and ruthless counterinsurgency. The effect of Alexander’s Bactrian campaign on his forces was demoralizing. The casualties produced in this alien land far exceeded those for all the battles that had brought down the Persian Empire. Alexander and his generals hunted down first one hyparch, then another, often wiping out entire villages in their path.

Nonetheless, the legendary Iskander’s military brilliance revealed itself yet again in the harsh conditions of Afghanistan. Alexander adapted his forces for unconventional warfare against an elusive opponent, devising means to neutralize the mobile raiding parties of Bactrian and Scythian horsemen. Among these innovations were rapid-reaction detachments composed of cavalry and light infantry, mountaineering, and the use of field artillery. Anyone who defied Alexander’s will to power would pay dearly, but the king also came to recognize Bactria’s inherent intractability. Four years of counterinsurgency in the wilds of Central Asia was leading nowhere. Considering his flank as secured as feasible with the military settlements in place, Alexander ranged southward to new conquests in India.

Hellenistic Bactria would survive for two centuries after its founding, though the kingdom was constantly rocked by intrigue, upheaval and internecine strife, as was characteristic of the region. When the descendants of Alexander’s Macedonian army eventually left around 125 B.C., they abandoned their walled cities, gymnasiums and amphitheaters. All soon fell into ruin and disrepair:

“Not in the palace, but in the theater, there appeared the most significant sign that the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had failed. Where once Alexander’s and Seleucus’s settlers had assembled by the thousands to keep alive their ancestral arts, where practiced actors had donned their masks and recited the line of classical poets, a new kind of tragedy now unfolded on a stage littered with the human wreckage of an awakened population. The natives needed no Greek theater, so they piled upon its stage and front row seats the scattered remains of their unburied dead, whose bodies were otherwise in the way”. (p. 164)

Greek culture was able to maintain itself in the remoteness of the Hindu Kush for a significant period of time, but American technical civilization will disappear just as soon as US forces withdraw.  Infrastructure such as schools, water treatment plants, and roads that policymakers tout as metrics of success will quickly go the way of the Greek colonists’ amphitheaters. Washington’s expenditures on creating ex-nihilo “good governance” and “accountability” in Afghanistan are more ambitious and ridiculous than Alexander’s conquering vision.  The luminaries of the counterinsurgency crowd are kidding themselves if they think they can meaningfully alter the region’s systemic instability and violence.

Alexander, a warrior whose genius is still unparalleled, a figure who was both successful and crazy enough to think himself a god, had seen enough of Afghanistan after a few years of hard, bitter fighting. US strategists today speak of a sustained, decades-long presence there, not to mention the possibility of escalating intervention in Pakistan, as part of an open-ended “War on Terror”-cum-social engineering experiment. So who’s crazier?

New light has been shed on Turkish intelligence operations in the United States after recent testimony by Sibel Edmonds. Edmonds was an FBI Turkish and Farsi translator who lost her job seven years ago after reporting extreme incompetence and espionage at her unit in Washington. Previous allegations centered on high-level penetrations of the Department of State and the Pentagon, as well as the illegal acquisition and sale of nuclear weapons technologies to bidders from the Middle East. The Israeli, Pakistani and Saudi secret services were also supposedly involved in the secrets-trading ring.

Now Edmonds has spoken further on Turkey’s espionage efforts in Washington, with particular focus on Ankara’s leveraging corruption in US Congress. In addition to its legal activities, the Turkish lobby in the United States acts as a vehicle for covert action and influence campaigns. Anyone familiar with AIPAC and the Jane Harmon affair won’t be terribly surprised by this; Edmonds also asserts that from 1996 to 1998 AIPAC and JINSA taught the Turks the rules of the game (and how to circumvent them). Turkish intelligence wasn’t shy about exploiting politicians’ greed or sexual deviations for recruitment purposes. The translator-turned-whistleblower even details one such “honey trap” in which Turkish operatives bugged the home of a married US congresswoman- just in time to record a lesbian affair between her and a Turkish agent.

Aside from other tawdry details, Edmonds also speaks about the complex networks used for laundering money derived from intelligence or criminal activities into campaign funds or representatives’ personal accounts. The Turks represent just one of many foreign powers spying on and cultivating the Washington establishment to meet business and geopolitical objectives, but Edmonds’ revelations show just how aggressively and energetically they go about it. Why, for example, would an Ohio congresswoman with no Turks in her district quite suddenly become an outspoken opponent of the term “genocide” when applied to the Ottoman Empire’s mass murder of Armenians in 1915? Hint: it doesn’t have to do with Realpolitik.

Another interesting aspect of the testimony is Edmonds’ confirmation that the Turkish secret services and associated crime groups move narcotics as well as Muslim militants from Afghanistan and Pakistan into Europe. US policy hasn’t been averse to all this, and indeed Washington needs Turkish cooperation for its plans in Central Asia and the Caucasus. A primary US goal is to undermine Russian influence in the region and achieve control of energy networks from the Caspian to the Black Sea. While carrying out a war on “terror”, US policymakers continue to tacitly cooperate with Turkish-backed madrasahs and fighters in Central Asia. A key figure in this strategy has been Fethullah Gülen, the leader of Turkey’s largest Islamist movement. Gülen resides in US exile, but his organization reaches into the Balkans, Afghanistan and the former Soviet states where it builds its ties on Turkic ethnicity and Islam. Edmonds explains:

Q: And if you know, how is it that [Gülen’s] allowed to be in the United States?

A: Because part of what he has in terms of the deal with certain segments in the United States is furthering the interests of the people who are interested in the energy sources in Central Asia…The best way to describe it [is that the] Cold War is not over. It’s a continuation of Cold War over those nations, and what we did in Afghanistan in [the] 1980s with mujahideen, we have been joined now in Central Asia by using Islam and extremism and these madrasahs, and Pakistani and Afghani elements to build…and staff in terms of those resources toward certain business interests. (pp. 97-98)

And who might some of those business interests actually be? A quick look at the American Turkish Council’s page of top sponsors gives us an idea:

-BAE Systems
-Bechtel Corporation
-Boeing
-Chevron
-Citigroup
-ExxonMobil
-General Electric
-Lockheed Martin
-Northrop-Grumman
-Raytheon
-United Technologies

With backers like these, Turkish intelligence networks can treat Washington as their playground and reasonably expect to get away with just about anything. US promotion of Turkish power in Eurasia, however, will carry consequences far graver than the fallout of a congressional espionage scandal.

In a column on the violent farce of attempting to impose modernity on Afghanistan, Justin Raimondo shares a rather sharp insight on contemporary Western society:

“As long as they’re allowed to fornicate freely, Westerners will believe they’re free and won’t so much mind being slaves.”

Doing away with morality is often accompanied by unhealthy political and economic centralization.  Morality here should be understood not simply as custom or empty bourgeois moralism, but the actual relation of man to laws of a divine nature. 

The population is encouraged by society’s elites to give free rein to its passions, a phenomenon driven as much by the will to transgression as by profit motives. The resulting chaos and breakdown in all spheres of life have a ready solution from the managerial class- more government power, which in our age translates to the allocation of further influence and revenue to the financial industry. This model is promoted abroad, from the entire array of multilateral institutions to global democratic revolution, if only to delay the inevitable. The elaborate charade will continue a while longer until it implodes from its own numerous contradictions. 

The corrosive elements unleashed by the deification of individual desire, all in the name of liberty, make men slaves, first to their passions, and then to exterior forces like creditors and the state. In such a way the dialectic passes quickly from personal liberation to collective enslavement. 

Some will cry for reason, as if its application will save man from himself. Yet reason alone cannot be a reliable guide to man in life- the rule of the passions, in all of its distorted manifestations, in secular society is sure evidence of this. In any fair duel between reason and the passions, the passions are sure to win out. Reason divorced from faith is the road to absurdity.  Only in the revelation of the transcendent, in communion with higher Reason, can we find the meaning and order that presently elude us.

Having finally gotten around to reading last week’s WSJ article regarding Joseph Biden’s comments on Russia, his statement that Moscow has no choice but to prostrate itself before Washington isn’t much of a shock. An expansion of US influence in countries bordering Russia is supposedly inevitable because of the harsh impact of the economic crisis there as well as presently dismal demographic projections.

Biden may have been “blunt”, in the words of the media, but he was also obtuse. He doesn’t merit excessive reproach, since he was simply reflecting US foreign policy consensus, which is informed by the view that economics is the determining factor in national power and even life itself. Whatever rhetorical flourishes one might employ, for such men there is no higher sacrament than the financial transaction. Like the Marxists, the champions of democratic capitalism see culture, religion, and centuries of tradition as the superstructure- merely contingent effects- of market forces. It’s all about individuals maximizing profit and pleasure, and everything else is just a sideshow.

Such an impoverished view of existence is indeed the ruling ethic in contemporary society throughout much of the world. While economics is undoubtedly a crucial element of a country’s capacity for action, it is unwise to grant it predominance to the exclusion of other factors. The Russian economy in particular has not historically run parallel with national power. As Napoleon, a man who knew a thing or two about trying to bend Russia to his will, said, “The moral to the physical is as three is to one”. Biden leaves no room for cultural considerations or Moscow’s vital interests in his analysis of Russia, and Washington will likely be unpleasantly surprised when the Kremlin makes further moves to lock down its sphere of influence in the former Soviet space.

The Russians will pursue their national interests and rebuild their power as a regional counterweight to the United States, and much of this action will be in response to US overreach deep into Eurasia. Espionage and machinations over financing for pipelines will be the rule of the day in this struggle, but there is a higher plane of conflict. After the horrors of the Soviet period, a new assault by secularism, multiculturalism and sundry other perversions against Russia has been underway. Groups such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Institute and the New Eurasia Foundation are well-funded and equipped for information operations, both by the US government and the financial class.

Liberal ideology has long been triumphant in the West, but if Russian culture can successfully repulse these phenomena and reassert the centrality of religious truth and tradition, it could give the Occident hope for the future.

This week’s visit to Ukraine and Georgia by Vice President Joe Biden showcased the limits of all the “reset” talk on Russia. The Obama administration wants Moscow’s cooperation on pressuring Iran out of its nuclear program, while at the same time continuing to support NATO entry for both Kiev and Tbilisi. So Washington will permit a change in atmospherics, but the strategic dynamic remains unchanged.

A culturally divided Ukraine and a fragmented, unstable Georgia will receive US support in joining the “Euro-Atlantic Community”. The Russians might be famous for their historically rooted paranoia, but with continuing US interference on Moscow’s periphery, they have adequate reason to be mistrustful.

A shift in rhetoric cannot long paper over essential continuities in US policy in Eurasia. As long as America works to undermine Russia’s zone of vital interests- through pipeline projects, military bases, and multinational institutions- we can expect the Russians to push back. There should be no surprises here- the Kremlin is responding to what can only be perceived as hostile initiatives in its neighborhood. It does little good for US policymakers and media commentators to be aghast, as they were last August, when the Russians finally act against steady encroachment on their frontiers. 

The regimes Washington brought to power in the former Soviet Union through “color revolutions” are willing participants in US designs for the region. The leaderships of Ukraine and Georgia have been eager to assert national independence in ways sure to provoke their powerful neighbor. In a seemingly coordinated move, both Viktor Yuschenko and Mikheil Saakashvili expelled Russian diplomats at the time of Biden’s trip. This was clearly done to emphasize the two governments’ anti-Moscow line in the context of their relations with the US.

In Kiev, the vice president came to deliver a “tough love” message to the Ukrainian government, replete with lectures about unity, transparency, accountability, etc. Telling other states how to run their affairs in order to progress toward the promised land of democratic capitalism comes quite naturally to US policymakers. However, Biden and his colleagues may not have much say in how Ukraine is run after January’s presidential elections. Moscow has ties with every major candidate besides the pro-Western Yuschenko, who has been quite unpopular for some time now.

One positive note seems to have been struck in Georgia, when Saakashvili couldn’t secure a request to Biden for US armaments. Some in Washington may have woken up to the fact that the US is playing a dangerous game in the Caucasus- as last year’s war would attest. Even so, the administration continues to humor the unstable Georgian president with assurances of eventual NATO accession and continued support. What actual vital interests the US has in bringing Georgia or Ukraine into its policy orbit and risking war with Russia are never articulated, because there are none. Sloganeering about the spread of “democratic norms”, “human rights”, or other idols of our age cannot obscure this reality.

Michael Vlahos has written an excellent piece on the Long War as a final, desperate spasm of liberal universalism, and the unintended consequences these campaigns spawn. Particularly sharp is this assessment of US foreign policy messianism:

“All of America’s great wars have been “holy” wars, the neon-electric lighting of national narrative: revolution was about a nation’s birthing, civil war was about inner redemption and world war about our redeeming all humanity.”

Redemption of humanity is a rather tall order, but this is the effective claim of democratic capitalism. The latest wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken as part of a long-term project to bring the Islamic world into the light of modernity. From Shanghai to San Francisco to Stockholm, all people are supposed to want the same basic thing: pluralism, physical and material comfort, consumer goods, and electronic amusements. Aside from its crude materialism, barely concealed within this narrative is the gnostic aspiration to remake the world anew by one’s own hand and knowledge. The common faith that men like Bush and Obama share is not Christianity, but rather the belief in democratic capitalism’s power of world transfiguration.

US intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, however, has not produced the desired results. As Vlahos explains, resistance to US policies is used by nations, tribes and other movements as a means of self-assertion. If a universalist ideology cannot take hold even among groups as difficult as the Pashtuns or the Iraqi Shia, it shows itself as a general failure:

“We refuse to call these states “failed” of course because this would expose the failure of modernity itself.”

Westerners have some serious thinking to do about the ideas they have held as sacred for the past few centuries or so.

The recent US-Russia summit produced fodder for photo-ops, but not much in the way of substance. The New York Times was shocked that President Obama, while given the Hasselhoff treatment by German audiences and other crowds around the world, was received rather indifferently by Muscovites. Clearly, Russians haven’t been sufficiently exposed to the mind-blowing, border-transcending greatness of The One.

A US president never avoids lecturing Russians on “backsliding” from progress to the blissful state of the modern West, but Obama was somewhat more toned-down about it than his predecessor. The two sides agreed on arms reduction, and Moscow granted the US access to an air corridor to ship military supplies to Afghanistan as a gesture of good will to start things off. From that point, missile defense in Eastern Europe, the Iranian nuclear issue and NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union were all discussed, but it seems there was no major movement on any of these topics. When the layer of rhetoric is peeled away, the underlying realities remain- the Russians look to consolidate and order their sphere of influence, while Washington still hopes to extend its dominance further into Eurasia.

There is an unavoidable sense that the Obama administration is operating on strategic assumptions that could soon no longer apply. Obama can jet into Moscow and spar with the Russians over potential US deployments in Poland and try to secure cooperation against Iran’s nuclear program- and all this is decoupled from continuing economic dislocations back home. If America is in for another drastic phase of financial meltdown- whether it happens overnight or over the course of a few years- how do US policymakers expect to shore up lavish alliance commitments and a global military presence?

We might learn what happens when the very foundations of Washington’s global trading system are undermined. The accumulation of astronomical debt and then attempting to print trillions more to “stimulate” the economy should leave other countries wary of hinging their future on a debased US currency. The dollar is losing the confidence of creditor nations like China, who are now arranging in a slow and deliberate manner to extricate themselves from a disaster generated by untold consumption and profligacy.

If there is a run on the dollar and hyperinflation, how does the governing class expect to foster “civil society” through counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, stabilize Pakistan, or “defend freedom” on the Russian periphery? These are questions regarding a foreign policy that envisions just about the entire world as a sphere of interest. Yet there would be precious little time or resources for old habits of power projection and spreading the gospel of democracy. The United States itself would face serious internal fissures at the political, social and regional levels as the result of major economic collapse.

Liberal universalist ideology and the inability to acknowledge imperial decline have combined to form a potent delusion of future capabilities. Before long, it might be the case that the levers of US power are devalued.

The recent crises in Iran and Honduras have produced plenty of rhetoric in Washington, very little of it constructive or relevant to actual US interests. Official statements do remind us of the vision of history held by the governing classes and diffused among the population at large.

Commenting on the post-election riots in Iran last week, Sen. John McCain said that the US must be on “the right side of history” in doing something (what, exactly?) for “human rights and values”. McCain mentioned the Prague Spring and the Greek War of Independence as precedents justifying his demand for a more confrontational line.

Meanwhile, in response to the Honduran army’s removal of that country’s leader Manuel Zelaya, President Obama was quick to warn,

“We do not want to go back to a dark past…We always want to stand with democracy.”

In the worldview of people from Obama to McCain, history is a glorious march forward, a progressive arc into the radiant future demanded by reason and built by individuals like protestors and human rights activists (according to left-liberals) or corporate titans, consumers and the men and women of the US armed forces (according to right-liberals). The dark ages have ways of reappearing in other countries to temporarily impede the forces of progress, but the dialectic must inexorably advance, whether by trade talks and dialogue, or sanctions and bombardment. It’s just a matter of time, you see, before they’ll be drinking Pepsi and enjoying fabulous parades and “reproductive rights”. They’ll eventually evolve to our more enlightened state, the thinking goes, and we’ll help them along the way.

The historicism implicit in the mindset of our elites derives from Left-Hegelianism and a debased, secularized imitation of Christian eschatology, topped off with a liberal-democratic endgame articulated by Francis Fukuyama. What has come to be generally known as Whig history and its theory of progress are rarely if ever challenged in mainstream society. After all, before the financial crisis the supply of credit was supposed to be practically unlimited, and economic expansion was guaranteed by its own logic.

Here’s an idea: perhaps the administration could formulate a ground-breaking new doctrine of benign intervention in which the democratic revolution, since its legitimacy is obvious to all, would be consolidated and protected. That way, the advance of history in “developing” nations like Afghanistan would never be in doubt.

While a little McCain goes quite a long way, he made one other telling statement regarding Iran:

“America’s position in the world is one of moral leadership,” the senator said. “It’s not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America’s conscience.”

It is indeed all about us. A way of thought that places at the center of existence man and his process of becoming, the movement toward sacrosanct liberation and equality he has divined by his own reason and will, is truly a function of cosmic narcissism.

68 years ago, on the eve of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, a group of Soviet scholars and scientists journeyed to Samarkand, Uzbekistan on an archaeological expedition. Their mission? Open the tomb of the legendary Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane. A Turco-Mongol warlord (also known as Timur) who claimed descent from Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and his armies rampaged through a good portion of 14th-century Eurasia and established an empire that stretched from the peaks of the Caucasus to the plains of India.

The project to open up Timur’s burial place in the massive, blue-domed Gur-e-Emir mausoleum was allegedly sanctioned by Stalin himself. Two witnesses to the effort, a cameraman and a son of one of the scholars, related their accounts to the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in a 2004 article. The team in Samarkand had already excavated several royal graves, and by June 19th, it was time to unseal Tamerlane’s. At this point the cameraman to the expedition was approached by three Uzbek elders who advised him leave the tomb in peace, for if it was disturbed, catastrophic war would be visited on those responsible. They also showed him this warning written in an old thick Persian text, supposedly from the 16th century, that detailed the lives and legends of the Timurid dynasty.

The cameraman then tells us of Tamerlane’s excavation:

“We had hardly opened the top of the sarcophagus…when the air began to smell of something dizzying. And the other opened graves didn’t have any kind of smell whatsoever. Somehow I felt uncomfortable. And then all of the sudden the lights went out. In the preceding three weeks of the dig there hadn’t been anything like it”.

The lights flashed back on for no explicable reason three hours later. The expedition then took Tamerlane’s remains for study, and the Soviet anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov was even able to reconstruct a likeness of the conqueror by examining his skull. Timur’s skeleton was reinterred in December 1942. Exactly why is unknown, but Russian journalists have speculated that Stalin ordered the body reburied to undo the alleged curse. Months later in early 1943, Soviet forces did prevail in the urban hell of Stalingrad.

So scientists opened Tamerlane’s tomb on June 19th, 1941. The Wehrmacht had, of course, been preparing logistically and manning positions months before June 1941 for war with Russia. Recent history has its share of “legends” such as this. Yet it is still a rather fascinating confluence of events that archaeologists set upon the supposedly cursed tomb of a great Eurasian warlord a mere two days before Hitler loosed his forces against the Soviet Union and began a military cataclysm of unprecedented scale. If superstitions hold any validity, let’s hope that Uzbek President Islam Karimov continues to refrain from poking around Timur’s resting place.

There seems to be a sense of shock among US media and policy elites that Russia is “outfoxing” the US in the former Soviet space. Despite being dealt a harsh blow by the economic crisis, Moscow isn’t rolling over and surrendering its sphere of interests to Washington.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal shows that Russia is taking countermeasures to dissipate US influence in Central Asia. Acting on Russian wishes, Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiev continues to demand that the US withdraw forces from Manas airbase, a logistical hub for the counterinsurgency in the “AfPak” theatre. This, in the eyes of WSJ, is the enactment of a sinister plan to destroy “Western-style democracy”. US influence is ultimately projected as part of a revolutionary project, and the Russians have shown they will oppose this ideology, whether it comes in the form of “civil society” NGOs or NATO expansion on Moscow’s periphery. Yet it’s important to take into account more immediate US goals for the region.

The piece, specifically focused on Kyrgyzstan, cannot fathom that the disappearances or mysterious deaths of opposition figures do not represent action against a high-minded movement for Hope and Change. As the chaotic 2005 “Tulip Revolution” already demonstrated, these incidents rather compose the tawdry reality of inter-clan struggles for patronage and financial resources. When competing factions call upon the support of the great powers, the strife is documented on the front pages of major US newspapers, and the fate of “freedom” is linked to the eviction of an airbase in the heart of Asia.

The Kyrgyz government and the leaderships of other Central Asian nations know the Russians aren’t going anywhere. The American position in Eurasia has always been tenuous, given that even an unrivalled maritime power can only exert its will deep into Central Asia for a limited period at best. Victorian Britain’s Great Game in Afghanistan provides a suitable analogy. This lesson is also applicable to Washington’s social-engineering program in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as its efforts to corner Central Asian energy.

While Moscow originally assented to what was supposed to be a temporary US presence after the 9/11 attacks, it is clear Washington has no intention of leaving Central Asia on its own initiative. Kyrgyzstan itself has no oil or natural gas, but the Manas airbase provides another platform for power projection along the region’s energy routes. In the former Soviet Union, the Russians can count on an excellent intelligence infrastructure, cultural affinities and established economic ties. They also know exactly whom to blackmail and whom to bribe to arrange a US exit. Yet these inherent advantages should be obvious, given that the region is Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.

The US establishment’s surprise at the Kyrgyz government’s eviction notice reflects a mentality failing to come to grips with imperial decline:

“Frankly, we thought it was a negotiating tactic, and we were ready to call their bluff,” said a military official. “But it’s becoming clearer that, no kidding, they want us out.”

No kidding.