Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

Well, crap.

It looks like the US may have actually managed to do something which will change the situation in Afghanistan in the long term, not just the short term: discovered large mineral deposits.

It's going to take a while to process the potential implications of this. Afghanistan has been an isolated place, ruled by tribal warlords and resisting any lasting change from foreign invasions for the past 2,300 years, in no small part because it has so little value to a conqueror; its positional strategic value is limited by the fact that it's so damned difficult to hold and to cross, its natural resources were nil, and it had little population. People would invade it as a buffer zone (Brezhnev), or to get from one place to another (Alexander, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane) or to deal with some group causing trouble (Auckland, Lytton, Bush), but nobody ever held it for a long period of time.

But now there's an estimated $1T of resources in the ground. On the one hand, local warlords are going to want to get in on the action; but they don't have anything like the technical or logistical capability to extract resources effectively and sell them on the market. That suggests "large foreign investment," which would normally be a euphemism for large companies setting up shop and extracting whatever they can, leaving behind as little as possible... but in an area quite as heavily-armed as this one, the normal techniques of this won't work. I could imagine Western companies coming in if they were backed by a heavy mercenary force, or Chinese companies coming in backed by government troops. Western forces would be backed by governmental forces too, primarily US, assuming that the US had any sense in this -- because if there are that many resources in the area, on top of its location, this place suddenly got a great deal more strategic, and keeping it out of the wrong hands (such as China's) is an important policy goal. Russia is obviously going to want in as well, and I'll bet that they're going to use their other resources in Central Asia (e.g., their ability to secure countries where the US needs to maintain military bases to support operations in Afghanistan) in order to ensure that they get it.

Looks like it may be time for another Great Game in the area. I do wonder exactly when people realized the extent of resources available — it may shed some interesting light on the decisions people have been making over the past several years.
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  • 12 comments
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benrosenbaum

June 15 2010, 12:16:21 UTC 5 years ago

I share to some extent your ideological worry. I have two counterbalancing responses, though. One is that we don't entirely know what an ascendant and secure China would look like -- what internal struggles and processes its rise would bring. If we cast back to the period when the US was still militarily weak and relatively impoverished compared to Europe, but the farsighted could already see its rise as predestined, we're talking about the Civil War era or just post Civil War -- when America was busily at work on concluding the genocidal takeover of the remains of the frontier, and either still in the grip of the peculiar institution, or restoring it in large part de facto via Jim Crow and the KKK; not to mention robber barons and sweatshops. I expect the humane values of an ascendant China will be different from ours, certainly. The emphasis on free speech might be lost, for instance. But there might be counterbalancing virtues. (This is sort of the Ibn Khaldunian model, in which barbarians by their very roughness always conquer the decadent, allowing them to flower into the humane peak of civilization, which inevitably leads to decadence and fall...)

The other thing is that it is not necessarily the case that the alternatives to American hegemony are Chinese hegemony or Cold-War struggle. It is possible to have a multipolar world with a general agreement on spheres of influence, in which trade and cooperation far outweigh occasional border skirmishes. The Great Powers of Europe achieved this for much of the time between Napoleon and WWI (to the increasingly great cost of the people they colonized, it bears mentioning); so did Islam, China and the various South Indian and Southeast Asian polities in the Indian Ocean region in the period ca. 800-1500.




zunger

June 17 2010, 05:39:43 UTC 5 years ago

Your first response got me thinking about the things which stayed the same and the things which changed for various countries. Many of the things which most characterized the US in the post-Civil War era could still be seen today; for example, a deep notion of national exceptionalism, a propensity for waves of religious fervor of a particular sort, and powerful shared ideas about individual liberty. And as you said, several other things changed -- robber-baron capitalism is no longer quite so popular, and as a country we seem considerably less bloodthirsty than we were back then.

My suspicion is that countries have a "national psyche," a set of common framing structures and narratives, which tends to stay fixed over very long periods of time, changed only by shocks on the scale of mass migrations; and on top of this, there is an ebb and flow of energy, with countries in their first flush of youth making a name for themselves by any means possible, and later -- if and when they're rich and established -- reining in things like Dickensian capitalism or military expansionism in favor of safety nets and the comforts of success.

I think it's this latter oscillation which Ibn Khaldun saw, but the constants are still there; even in his time, Rome was not Baghdad, and one could not confuse the courts and countrysides of Tamerlane and of Clovis, separated though they were by a similar span from their conquering histories. I don't doubt that an ascendant China would have its own virtues, but I fear that many of its underlying traits – its powerful respect for authority over the individual, its calm acceptance of extraordinary gaps of power – would stay the same.

I do agree about the multipolarity of the future world; the bipolar world of the Cold War was an accident of history, not likely to happen very often. But the US and China will surely be two of the biggest fish in this pond...

(Side note: We should totally have had a panel about something related to this at WisCon. It would have been really interesting.)