Apologies that this is two days late. I have excuses, but they are just excuses.
Today’s memorials of that sad and epochal day 20 years ago had the flavor of not with a bang but a whimper. The recent devolution in Afghanistan — something with which both American sides actually agree notwithstanding the shouting and handwringing and renting of garments — has quieted the mood I think. Not that there is a broad accepted understanding of what liberal democracy faces in jihadism. I think we don't see if for what it is — a reflux of a stream of thought and action, in modern form, that is as old as the religion.
I’m going to look at this from two angles — firstly the military history point of view, and then secondly reflecting on the flux and reflux of history with reference to the thought of the 14th century Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun.
In both cases, I start with a link to a post from my old blog. May I suggest that you treat that only as a link for the time being and dive into whatever I manage to write today.
War and Liberalism, redux
As all eyes are on Afghanistan, it got me to reread this post from January, 2010, about a different war’s devolution:
I broadly still agree with what I wrote. Progressive thinkers need to understand war and military history, even those who deplore it without exception. Those who eschew the study of war will get it wrong every time.
That said, my touching if hedged optimism about Afghanistan back in 2009 has obviously come a cropper. We are watching the devolution right now, the last American planes having left and the Taliban dancing an immodest jig of victory on the tarmac and in the streets. My error was not that there might be optimism in Afghanistan, but rather not to hedge that optimism more explicitly in the sure knowledge the the US did not possess the requisite political will or sophistication to succeed.
As we watch, or read as in my case, the copious news about Afghanistan, there is no way not to be impressed by the logical impossibility of all the main arguments. President Biden had the courage to make the call, even based on the pointedly lousy deal with which the previous incumbent stuck him. Then when the whole thing turned ugly, as anyone with any insight whatsoever knew would happen, that had to be Biden’s fault. Get everybody out, but don’t hurt anybody while you do it. When ISIS figured a few keen explosions would assist in its recruitment campaign for an impending war against the Taliban, that too was seen as Biden’s fault.
I do fault the administration for failing to see what was obvious, that the Afghan state, such as it was, would collapse epically and immediately. Military collapses happen that way; they cascade rapidly once the jig is up. Panic breeds panic. Once a soldier knows it is lost, the instinct is self-preservation. Remember that the talibs are cut from the same society as the Afghan army. They know each other. Our grand plan was that we would teach these recruits how to fight, and that they would secure this new-fangled state. I read a nice take on this that, paraphrased, went like this: trying to teach an Afghan youth how to fight is like trying to teach a Cajun to fish … they already got it, okay.
And there’s a point there. The US and its allies presented this as a war cloaked in morality, and that our efforts were directed to construct a morale among the Afghans that would gird them to fight for themselves. But the experience on the ground by all accounts was bloody and dreary as wars are, and the result of that is that morale and morality tend to live far from the battlefield. Our problem in large part was that we did not see that our enemy had arguably a greater claim to morality, one vested in their interpretation of the religion which they shared with all but one or two of the Afghan population. We could never win a battle of morality in Afghanistan.
What we hoped behind the moral cloaking was that we might create a collective sense of self-interest, that sticking together in this project to create a modern democratic state would steal the moral imperative from the jihadis, and lightness and truth would reign. Of course, Afghans have lived there longer than us and they knew what collective self-interest would amount to — obscene corruption. And so it was. The corrupt self-interested state collapsed like a house built of cards.
Liberals must be crystal clear in their vision and not let it be clouded by our moralistic impulses. You have to see if you want to judge. You cannot judge and then align your sight to your judgment.
That’s how I see all the bleating now about how Biden should have done this or that, and how we have to rescue this person or that one. Of course, like all of us, I view each escapee as a victory and I rejoice in their freedom. And I mourn the lost opportunities and lives of those who cannot get out. But that emotion cannot cloud understanding. And we need to understand that this was going to happen, and so it did.
The Light that Ibn Khaldun’s Ideas Casts on Afghanistan
I have been studying Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) since the late 1980s when I took my first class with Ira Lapidus as an undergraduate at Berkeley. Professor Lapidus eventually sat on my doctoral dissertation committee. I can frankly say that he more than anyone influenced how I view Islam (although, naturally, he is not responsible in any sense for my ramblings, and especially not responsible for my strident atheism). His work focused on the roles of elites in the construction of Islamic societies. Any educated person who wants an excellent and comprehensive reference history of Islam should rush to bookshop.org and purchase his A History of Islamic Societies (1988, 3rd ed 2014).
This is what I wrote about Ibn Khaldun, with reference to Ernest Gellner's estimable study, Muslim Society:
Ibn Khaldun was a remarkable and prescient thinker whose reputation, curiously, is almost certainly all the greater because of the attentions paid to him by 19th and 20th century Orientalists. He is sometimes described as a sociologist, and people like to make out that he is the first this or the first that. Be that as it may, he was the first Muslim writer to develop a comprehensive theory of history.
(Parenthetically, I am just now finishing Robert Irwin’s Ibn Khaldun, An Intellectual Biography. Irwin filled me in on a bunch of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas and events of his life that were less germane to my earlier doctoral work. But, frankly, Irwin annoys me. It seems more like a litany than a biography. And, curses, he does not transliterate Arabic terms accurately so it is a bear to look them up in a dictionary.)
There are three key Ibn Khaldun ideas that bear upon thinking about Afghanistan, to whit, the cyclical nature of history, ‘aṣabiyyah (عصبية), and istiṣlāḥ (إستصلاح)*. For the two latter terms, think broadly, for the first, of esprit as in esprit de corps, and for the second, of concern for the public interest. (I know these terms exclusively through my study of Ibn Khaldun; my Arabic is certainly insufficient to understand how these words might be used today, and my overall command of the history of Islamic thought is not sufficient to comment on how others have used these terms, in the past or present.)
The notion of the cyclicity of history is not unique to Ibn Khaldun and it is not in anyway characteristic of Islamic theology. But Ibn Khaldun was among the first, possibility the first, historian to advance such a theory. He focused on the rise and fall of dynasties in his native muslim Spain and North Africa. He saw that a dynasty, once established, was slowly weakened and corrupted by power and especially by the comforts of urban life. Urban life led to a lax and increasingly heterodox approach to austere religion. Not unlike many intellectuals, Ibn Khaldun saw his own milieu as filled with deceit and illicit pleasures, with lies and heresy.
He viewed with far greater admiration the martial tribes who surrounded the cities and who, when they felt like it, were often in the service of the dynasty. The tribes, with their successes in war and austere orthodoxy in religion, were characterized by what he called ‘aṣabiyyah. This term is sometimes translated esprit or esprit de corps, sometimes as brotherly feeling, sometimes as group solidarity feeling. At bottom, it refers to a moral universe in which an individual’s feelings are subsumed in and generated from a group’s morale and superseding authority. Similar almost “noble savage” type ideas have inspired religious reformers as well as dreamy romantics through the ages — think Calvin or Shelley and Byron. Self-loathing has long been a disheartening tendency among too many intellectuals.
But for our purposes, Ibn Khaldun saw ‘aṣabiyyah as the motor force of the cyclicity of history. Once the dynasty was thoroughly urbanized and corrupted, the ‘aṣabiyyah-endowed surrounding martial tribes would march in and teach the corrupt and self-involved urbanites a good, swift, painful lesson filled with cruel punishment-happy religion. Without going into great details, this is a pattern that has broadly characterized Muslim political entities, both vast and local, for a long time beginning arguably with Mohammed’s war on Mecca.
If Ibn Khaldun were looking at Afghanistan, he would see this cyclicity in the ‘aṣabiyyah of the Taliban’s hydra-headed tribal confederacy and its successful destruction of the corrupt and urbanized “dynasty”. As with so much in Islamic thought, there is a resigned feeling of inevitability to this alongside its blaring triumphalism.
Before trying to draw all this together, it is worth a quick look at istiṣlāḥ, concern for the public good. This is a core motivating idea for Ibn Khaldun, the notion that the state should should act in the first instance for the public good, and that mere concern for dynastic survival was often antithetical to this. Modern Western liberals must understand, however, that in Islamic thought any concern for the public good can only be transmitted through religion. This irreducible “sole vehicle” status for Islam is a constitutive reason for its stultifying intellectual effect on Islamic societies, the more so given that political and social success in such a system can be predicated largely on what Gellner calls a “competitive sycophancy”. And it is that “competitive sycophancy” that may well be the cause of a impending chaos in Taliban governance, notwithstanding the unanimity of their religious opinions and the ‘aṣabiyyah that got them to where they are today.
What Ibn Khaldun Might Think is Next for Afghanistan
That is an arrogant subtitle, and I know it. Ibn Khaldun wouldn’t have much time for the likes of me. And, given his life history, he would probably be one of the folks on a plane out of town notwithstanding his admiration for what we now call jihadis. But, this is the point of this piece, so off we go.
The problem that the Taliban face is that they got what they wanted. The corrupt satanists have been chased from the palace, and all their riches, minus what the departing “sultans” managed to salt away out of country, have fallen into Taliban hands. Yesterday their mobs were sleeping in ditches, cradling their weapons. Now they stand guard, at least in the cities, over a population that is vastly more sophisticated, vastly more entitled, vastly more savvy, and vastly more hungry, than they.
The Taliban is not so much one unit as it is a sometimes looser, sometimes tighter amalgamation of great array of formations, some of them amalgamations themselves. I’ve never read anything that describes their command and control system, but you have to assume that rising up in the ranks implied having a broad map of the myriad relationships, and a facile ability to exploit them as needed. These formations or amalgamations are based on numerous factors including especially local and foreign ethnic connections, personal loyalties, and economic interests: remember that perhaps the most reliable source of income for the Taliban has long been the poppy and opium trade. There is no doubt a “flux and reflux” of power and dominance within the grand amalgam. Alas, I have rarely found deep analysis on the particulars of who these parts are and how they work and change; you have to work with a lot of articles touching on this and that and sew it together yourself, which is not a recipe for deep understanding. And, to repeat, I have never seen a deep analysis of command and control on the battlefield or in the conquered regions. Perhaps if I were a spy … o well, a different lifetime.
The internal tensions that the spoils of battle largely papered over in the now past struggle to conquer are bound to come to fore. Now that the Taliban are in control, those with the unsoiled perahan o tunban will start accumulating the spoils of victory to the exclusion of those with dirt on their shoes, and they will compete with each other, their supporting units at the ready. In Ibn Khaldun’s notion, they will quickly adapt to and be corrupted by the urban environment, especially Kabul. The ‘aṣabiyyah of their forces will weaken and fracture. Some of their armed followers will quickly see the more austere ISIS as a return to the purity of the quest, and repair again to the countryside and the ditches from which they have successively conquered empires.
The problem for governance is that the only unifying principle, which is istiṣlāḥ, is itself fungible. Easy to say that all decisions will be based on Islamic Shariah, but the devil is in the details. They have to work those details out under pressure from the society that they conquered. They have only around 70,000 fighters, but lobbing grenades from a ditch is very different from policing a chaotic urban environment. The “competing sycophancy” nature of Islamic thought will lead to lots of graphic horrors, but underneath that I think there will be very little unified government. China, Russia, and Pakistan can dump loads of food aid from the sky, but they will not be able to solve the inherently fissiparous character of the Taliban amalgam.
So I think Ibn Khaldun would be running away from this Islamic success — and he had to run away numerous times in his storied life — because it is so unstable. The ‘aṣabiyyah will turn into its opposite, and the istiṣlāḥ will be a banner and and a bunch of bloody deeds but not a unifying principle.
If history is cyclical (which, for reference, is not my point of view), then what comes next? Is there some strain of thought in Islam that can be used to end the race to the bottom?
I’m not optimistic and I surely fear for our Afghan brothers and sisters who fall afoul of these fanatics.
If you made it this far, my friend, I owe you a coffee. As I start to blog again, I am confronting the changes in myself and my point of view. I think most of all, it may take a while to get back to being a little more succinct.
Up next: still working on reflections on road bike racing
*Note: I have inserted characters with dots underneath to represent Arabic emphatic consonants This works on my Mac. Drop me a note with your platform and browser if it does not work for you