Summer Essay: A Failure of Will and Competence

 By

Julian Lindley-French

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security.  They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom.  When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Abstract: This food for thought essay considers the wider strategic implications and lessons for Europeans and their future defence in the wake of the defeat in Afghanistan. The core message is that for the sake of the transatlantic relationship and Europe’s own defence if European leaders continue to adhere to a political culture marked by strategic illiteracy, political short-termism, and defence pretence Europe could well be heading for disaster. Unfortunately, liberal European political leaders, particularly those in Western Europe, seem to have little idea about how to address the twin threats posed by ultra-conservative violent extremists and ultra-nationalist Great Power Competitors.  NATO is the only institution capable of mounting both credible deterrence and dealing with the worst transnational threats. American political fatigue and military over-stretch has also revealed the extent of Europe’s wilful weakness which only a profound change in European political and strategic culture is likely to change.  NATO is making much of the need to strengthen the political cohesion of the Alliance.  In fact, political cohesion is a metaphor for the threat that the North American and European pillars of NATO could be decoupled.  To succeed the NATO 2030 Agenda will need proof of European willingness to share far more of the burdens of their own defence.  A Europe Agenda 2030 should place the strengthening of the NATO European pillar at the very core of the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept.

September 6th, 2021.

Four American presidents…

After four American presidents, tens of thousands of lives destroyed and broken, and billions of dollars spent the Western-led coalition has succeeded in replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.  Why did the West abandon Afghanistan so catastrophically, and what are the strategic implications for Europeans? The real reason was not just the pre-conceived ‘America First’ view of President Biden.  What led to his holding that view was a long-held belief that the war was unwinnable.  Dig deeper and one finds growing US concerns about the cost to them of a lack of European unity, political will, bureaucratic competence and military capability and capacity all of which are steadily undermining NATO and which again threatens to decouple the United States from its European allies.  Naturally, political distraction machines are at operating high speed on both sides of the Atlantic to mask the scale of the failure.  For all the spin liberal Europe’s now many ultra-conservative and ultra-nationalist enemies which surround it will not have missed the essential point: Europeans no longer have the will, the competence, the political fortitude, or the strategic patience to face them down.

There were failures of strategy in Afghanistan.  In spite of all the efforts to ‘de-conflict’ tensions between the counter-terror, stabilisation and reconstruction and counter-narcotics campaigns such frictions were at times all too apparent.  Depending on who was in command, and some new commanders did have a tendency to re-invent the wheel, the campaign was a bit like conducting the strategic bombing campaign against Germany from the air, whilst implementing the Marshall Plan on the ground.  This was not a failure of structure. In three reports I wrote for commanders between 2008 and 2014 it was evident that political leaderships, particularly in European countries, were ever less interested in military advice.  After 2010 the problem became acute as political leaders egregiously cut European defence budgets even as the military workload grew.  The ends, ways and means crisis that dogged the campaign throughout culminated in a public row between the British Secretary of State for Defence, Philip Hammond, and General Sir Richard Shirreff, Deputy Supreme Commander of NATO.  Shirreff had warned that a further cut to the British Army of some 20,000 regular troops (20% of the force) in the middle of the campaign to be replaced by part-time reservists was “one hell of a gamble”.  He was right. Such frictions were not helped by the incredibly long and very varied screwdrivers each national capital applied to each of their respective operations on the ground. Consequently, both the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Operation Resolute Support were not so much a tight coalition of the willing and able, as multiple national mini-operations tied loosely together by Allied Joint Force Command.  A better name might have been NATO Operation Irresolute, Wholly Conditional and Utterly Inconsistent Rules of Engagement. This was not the fault of the many brave men and women who served and too often died on the ground, but the lack of political unity of purpose and effort at the highest levels of European governments. 

When America retreats

The strategic consequences? When America retreats the rules-based international order retreats and replaced by the anarchy of Realpolitik beloved by the enemies of freedom. Some will find that statement challenging given that some US actions have in the past have also appeared been questionable under international law.  It is certainly true that at times the US places itself above international law precisely to preserve it. When President Biden said last week that America no longer wanted to be the world’s policeman he was also saying that America no longer saw itself as the ‘Shining City on the Hill’, just yet another Great Power engaged in Great Power Competition.  By abandoning Afghanistan in the way they did the Americans have also destroyed the very concept of liberal interventionism and the very idea that American and its allies should always leave a place better off when they leave it.  Moreover, by retreating into a deterrence and punishment strategy the Americans and their Allies are also abandoning the very idea that the struggle for the twenty-first century peace is essentially one of values.  Power is now all that matters and international affairs will henceforth be conducted on the battleground ultra-conservatives and ultra-nationalists have chosen.  What is more likely is one of those very Washington periods of frenzied introspection about the nature of American engagement in this Huxley-esque not so brave new world. For all the talk of the new post-Afghanistan American isolationism the Americans will recover. 

Europe?  The withdrawal from Afghanistan has not only demonstrated how little influence Europeans have over US policy, but the extent to which Europeans have become the Great Strategic Pretenders. If Europeans do not escape from the curse of pretence under which they labour and soon they will court disaster.  They already are. The retreat from Afghanistan should remind Europeans that the US might not always be able to be present in strength in Europe all of the time. China and Russia are actively collaborating to stretch US military power ever thinner the world over.  Whatever happens now the future defence of Europe will depend on Europeans doing far more for their own defence.  If Europeans do not better share transatlantic burdens then they could soon find themselves bearing all of those burdens.  

Defeat in Afghanistan has also definitively marked the moment when it was no longer possible to pretend that US and European foreign and security policy goals, such as the latter exists, can be lumped together simply by appealing to shared values. In the twenty years since 911 and the intervention in Afghanistan both America and Europe have changed profoundly. 2001 was a particular moment in history and not simply because of 911.  For a brief American moment neo-conservatives gained power and believed they had achieved global hegemony in what turned out to have been an equally brief unipolar moment. In the immediate wake of 911 Europeans felt duty bound to follow the Americans come what may, if for no other reason to save NATO.  Afghanistan and Iraq soon disabused them of political hegemony and the coalition very quickly dissolved.  And then came the banking and financial crises caused by cowboy capitalists who did more damage to the superiority of the West than any peer competitor.  The crisis they caused catapulted China and Asia to the fore and both America and particularly Europe have yet to recover.  It is no coincidence that the Afghanistan campaign ran out of political steam soon after the crisis.    

The hard truth is that whilst Americans went to war in Afghanistan, the majority of Europeans entered that war with an entirely peacetime mind-set that never changed.  For the campaign in Afghanistan to have had any chance of working it would have required much greater political commitment from the West, far greater control on the money and arms the West shipped into Afghanistan, a far better system of shared and robust metrics to measure progress (or otherwise), a much greater willingness to share the risks of the campaign, and far greater unity of purpose and effort.  The Americans wanted the forces and resources of allies and partners, but also complete control over the campaign.  The Europeans wanted to influence the campaign, but were never willing to invest in the forces and resources needed to do so.  Rather, risk-averse European capitals became ever more concerned about political appearance and an addiction to long screw-driver, box-ticking projects that had more to do with the political situation back home than Afghanistan’s reality. As for the all-important wider regional strategy it simply never happened because China, Iran, and Russia were all too happy to see the West mired in Afghanistan, whilst India and Pakistan were conducting their own parallel cold war.

NATO: resetting or decoupling?

What of NATO? If the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept is to be anything more than another exercise in self-serving European short-termism and defence pretence (and it will need to be) it must be underpinned by political realism.  NATO’s two core missions are deterrence (not defence) and engaging transnational threats both of which rely on political and military credibility.  To that end, the 2022 Strategic Concept will talk much about greater Alliance political cohesion.  In fact, ‘cohesion’ is simply a metaphor for what will be a transatlantic battle to prevent the US and Europe from de-coupling.

The US is tired, politically divided, mired in debt, and in urgent need of reinvesting in itself, its people, and its infrastructure.  Europeans are increasingly isolationist word junkies, addicted to irrelevance, as the latest iteration of EU hope over experience will attest, the forthcoming and absurdly named EU Strategic Compass and the Initial Entry Force (IEF) will attest. European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) redux? At least back in 1999 Britain was still in the EU and without Europe’s most high-end capable expeditionary power it is hard to see quite where the initial entry bit will come from.  The so-called (missed) Headline Goal and the ERRF was a political exercise to mask Europe’s failings in the wake of the 1999 Kosovo campaign.  The IEF is another such exercise to hide Europe’s embarrassment in the wake of the Afghanistan defeat, simply because the forces of EU Member-States are now so weak they are incapable of securing one airport.

NATO faces another problem, a lack of leadership from the Alliance’s three major Powers, Britain, France and Germany.  There is no disrespect intended to the likes of Italy, Poland, Spain and others but NATO’s European pillar has always been built around these three states. Liberal Western European high political and bureaucratic elites have shown themselves to be incapable of dealing with ultra-conservative transnational and ultra-nationalist state threats because to do so would require them to abandon their delusional ‘world as they would like to be’ beliefs that have so undermined their competence as security actors. Enhanced ‘political cohesion’ would be meaningless if Western European leaders continue to lack the essential strategic and political will to properly confront the threats they and their Allies face?

The abandonment of competence in Berlin, London and Paris has been masked by American power but it can no longer be hidden.  Their political and strategic shallowness has now been laid bare together with the obsession with optics over substance and the 24 hour news cycle.  The lazy globalist ideology of such elites also stubbornly refuses that globalisation has a dark side that undermines the very political cohesion and resiliency which is the foundation of any credible NATO defence and deterrence posture or security engagement. Their steady erosion of what might be termed a European strategic culture for fear that some despot somewhere or other shouts ‘imperialism’.  Their deliberate confusion of moderate patriotism with nationalism and the offense it causes to millions of decent citizens who live outside the closed echo chamber of European elites.  Ultimately, this break down in trust between increasingly distant leaders and their citizens reveals Europeans leaders who no longer to trust their people, and European peoples increasingly contemptuous of their leadership caste.  Ancien regime?

A contest of wills

War is a contest of wills. Putin and Xi understand this. They also understand that contemporary warfare starts with the application of disruptive information against the weak seams of fragile societies.  Beijing and Moscow also understand the significance of the West’s defeat in Afghanistan even if the West is in purposeful denial.  That is precisely why Beijing invited Taipei to think hard on the lessons of America’s defeat in Afghanistan.  Would the Americans really defend Taiwan? Are the Americans not in any case committed to the eventual reunification of China?  Putin and Xi also understand the price an increasingly sentimental Western Europe is willing to pay for a comfortable life, unlike their partners in Central and Eastern Europe who understand the price of freedom. That line was crossed back in 2014 in Ukraine and then in Syria in 2015 when Russia moved decisively to fill a Western influence vacuum. There are those who routinely point out that Europe is stronger on paper than Russia, but then paper is pretty much all that Europe can offer.  The pot-marked pike-ways of history are littered with such paper when ostensibly weaker but more ruthless Powers defeated ‘greater’ but far softer ‘Powers’.

The most important objective now is to disabuse those of their prejudice that the West is weak and irresolute. Credible deterrence will depend on it.  Much of that effort will need to be European. Given the respective GDPs of Western European powers, their defence industrial and technological bases, and their populations much of that effort will depend on the leadership of Britain, France and Germany.  There is no doubt Europeans could mount a much better defence than they do, even in the face of COVID economics. Unfortunately, the usual mantra of Europe’s leaders is either they simply cannot afford their own defence or that no risk exists.  Both responses are contemptuous of Europe’s reality and Europeans will need to do far more for themselves if they are to close the yawning gap between the ends, ways and means of European defence.  What European leaders really mean when they say they are not able to afford Europe’s defence is that they do value security and defence highly enough as a public good to properly invest in it.  As long as the Americans feed their addiction they will continue to claim defence poverty so that they can spend on the very things that get them re-elected but which Americans now also need to invest in: education, health, social care, infrastructure etc.

Europe also suffers from a profound political crisis over the role and utility of military power in international affairs.  London has all but abandoned the land defence of continental Europe in the wake of Brexit and retreated behind its nuclear deterrent, whilst literally 'showboating' Global Britain by sending one of its new but under-equipped and under-protected aircraft carriers into the Indo-Pacific. Paris is forever grandstanding with its hypocritical calls for ever closer European defence integration and ever more European strategic autonomy, even though  Paris is neither willing to give up sovereignty over its armed forces to add substance to such vision nor invest the money required to match words with deeds. Worse, Franco-British relations, the core of any meaningful European defence, are at their worst since at least 1966 and France's then withdrawal from military NATO.  With Macron’s France pushing the EU hard to subordinate post-Brexit Britain that critical relationship is likely to get far worse before it gets better.

However, for all the strategic pretence of London and Paris the real problem is Berlin which is fast becoming a pacifist, mercantilist power which wants the benefits of leadership without the responsibility, partly out of fear of itself. The decision to abandon civilian nuclear power and the construction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline has led Berlin to rely overly on Russia for much of its energy mix. And yet, without the tight leadership of Britain, France and Germany a vaguely autonomous European defence that could ease the burdens on the US will be impossible.  Unfortunately, Nordstream 2 also drives a pipeline through the credibility of NATO deterrence.  Whilst no state power would consider attacking Germany, let alone nuclear-armed Britain and France, the lack of will and competence in Berlin, London and Paris allied to American military over-stretch is fast leading to a crisis of deterrence at the margins of the Alliance. It is only demonstrable US resolve and power that deters Russia in the Baltics or around North Cape and Svalbard.  The cost of offsetting wilful European weakness will become ever more politically contentious in Washington.  In other words, over the next decade America will only be able or willing to back Europeans if Europeans again do far more for themselves. Period. As the Americans would say.

NATO and Europe Agenda 2030

It seems fitting that I am writing this essay just as the ‘hot phase’ of Russia’s ZAPAD (West) 21 exercise is about to begin.  Some 200,000 participants will take part, 80 aircraft and helicopters, and as many as 800 pieces of military equipment, including some 300 tanks and 10 warships will take part.  Given the pace and scale of the post-Afghanistan threats facing Europe the only show in town remains NATO.  The only plan available is the NATO 2030 Agenda and the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept.  The only real strategic objective Europeans should concern themselves with the strengthening of NATO’s European pillar and with it a more equitable sharing of the transatlantic burdens of European defence.  Given that reality the Europeans do not need yet another exercise in strategic irrelevance such as the EU ‘Initial Entry Force’ which, if it ever becomes more than an EU Military Staff database, will again be too little doing not very much and never very often.  Rather, Europeans must ask themselves what is it they need to do to enable the Americans to continue to provide a security guarantee through NATO.  That means Europeans actually recognising the threats they face, as opposed to only recognising as much threat as they think their social welfare states can bear. Europe’s defence can no longer simply be paid for by what’s left after social security.

Therefore, to succeed NATO 2030 Agenda needs a Europe Agenda 2030. Firstly, Europeans must now move decisively to ease the threat that the US might become over-extended in the event of multiple engineered crises the world over.  Secondly, Europeans should by 2030 deploy a high-end, first responder, multi-domain future force which is fully plugged into the 2030 US command and control systems and structures, and reinforced by all the emerging and disruptive technologies now entering the battlespace. In other words, Europeans need to go far further than the strategically piddling ‘IEF’.  Specifically, NATO Europe must collectively aspire to the creation of an Allied Command Operations European Heavy Mobile Force of sufficient technological capability, with sufficient autonomous and robust enablers and thus 21st century manoeuvre and all arms ethos, to deter in and around Europe irrespective of pressures on US forces.  A force that will also be of sufficient mass to support front-line states to the south of the Alliance facing a host of transnational threats.  This is because for all the talk about seeking ‘improved’ political cohesion in the forthcoming NATO Strategic Concept the real ‘elephant in the room’ is the renewed threat that European defence is becoming decoupled from the Euro-Atlantic Area.

Thankfully, the building blocks to construct an empowered and enabled NATO European expeditionary sea-bed to space defence (in future all defence will be expeditionary by nature and necessity) are in place.  However, they must be markedly expanded, equipped with far more strategic enablers, many more robust expeditionary capable forces, kept at a far higher state of readiness.  In September, the Joint Support and Enabling Command in Ulm will reach full operating capability which will be vital for the future of land deterrence in Europe. The British Carrier Strike Group should form the core of a much enhanced NATO Europe maritime and amphibious capability, along with its French, Italian and Spanish counterparts.  The Franco-British Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF) needs to be widened and deepened and together with the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) help establish a new framework command for coalitions of European allies and partners.  This new NATO Europe will also need a host of new intelligence-gathering efforts and automated indicators that would give real European meaning to NATO’s all-important Warfighting and Deterrence Concepts.  Indeed, the real test of the relevance and realism of the 2022 NATO Strategic will be the extent to which it generates strategic depth by placing those two concepts front and centre together with the Defence and Deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) and the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept (NWCC).  Above all, Europeans need to forge a new concept of deterrence with the North American allies across the hybrid, cyber, conventional and nuclear spectrums of future war.  There is one more thing: NATO cannot deal with transnational threats unless it also has a concept of intervention and engagement.  That does not mean more Afghanistans, but it will mean the Allies cannot simply ditch the very idea of stabilisation operations as simply too difficult to contemplate.

In the end, for all the many challenges posed by Afghanistan the defeat therein was ultimately a failure of political will and that will be the most difficult thing for Europeans to change. Years of avoiding hard choices has left the European political elite strategically illiterate.  Some will point to COVID as the cause of the malaise but as this food for thought paper demonstrates that failure that is European defence is a structural failure that goes back at least as far as the decades I have been working on it.  It is also a profound failure of leadership compounded by an EU mired in its own hyperbole and eternally practising to be a security actor. Twenty years on from 911 the defeat in Afghanistan will have profound implications for the Americans, not least because of the symbolism of its very timing. However, it is Europeans who in the end could well pay the highest price. 

Edward Gibbon, were he alive today, might well have written that when Europeans finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Europe ceased to be free and was never free again. 

Julian Lindley-French

Afghanistan: A Briefing

“Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on the American homeland”.

President Joe Biden, August 16^th, 2021

August 18th, 2021

Abstract

The reference by President Biden to US interests sounded more like a High Victorian imperialist than a Democratic president. The abject Western retreat from Afghanistan will be catastrophic for many of its people. The decision by both Presidents Trump and Biden to set fixed dates for withdrawal whilst seeking to exert little or no pressure on the Taliban to establish a transitional government afforded the latter a planning holiday to prepare for their successful offensive.  President Biden has decided that on balance a Taliban-led Afghanistan will no longer pose a sufficient threat to the US and its allies to justify a continued American presence and that there is little point in propping up a corrupt Afghan government. The failure to withdraw civilians before US forces and to properly consult Allies will damage NATO and remind Europeans it is high-time they came of age as security actors.  The wider consequences for the US and the West are as yet unclear, but after failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by ceding the ground to others in Libya and Syria, the fall of Kabul marks the definitive end of Western liberal interventionism.  It could also mark the end of Western efforts to establish an institutionalised world order. A version of the Great Game between Russia, China, India and Iran is already beginning in Afghanistan and it could well mark the return of global Realpolitik in which Great Power Competition and systemic global reach terrorism flourish. Unfortunately, the West no longer knows what it wants or how to achieve it and others will draw their own conclusions from this disaster about the reliability of the US as a friend and partner, and the utility of Europeans as either. 

Smoke and errors

It is not quite the First Afghan War redux, but the victory of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is not far short of it. On 1 January 1842, following an ‘agreement’ between Major-General William Elphinstone, commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and Pashtun warriors, the British began what they thought would be safe passage from Kabul to British India for 4,500 military personnel and 12,000 mainly Afghan and Indian ‘camp followers’.  As soon as the retreat began the civilians and their military escort came under attack from Ghilji warriors. On the second day, the Royal Afghan Army’s 6^th Regiment, in which the British had invested much effort, deserted.  Only one British officer and seven Indian soldiers survived the ensuing massacre.  To date, 2,448 US military personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since 2002, along with over 1,200 other Coalition personnel and more than 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police. At least 47,000 Afghan civilians have also been killed with almost 400,000 Afghans displaced since May 2021 alone. It is also believed that over 50,000 Taliban fighters have died in the conflict.  The cost alone of training and equipping the collapsed Afghan National Army has been some $88bn/€75bn/£64bn whilst President Biden says the US has spent over $1.5 trillion. By any standards what has happened in Afghanistan over the past few days is a monumental failure for the US and its Western Allies. The US has been humiliated, Europeans revealed for the security lightweights they are, and on the hills around Kabul the last dying embers of Western liberal interventionism extinguished.  Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Afghanistan are now all testaments to twenty-first century Western strategic incompetence. However, anger is not analysis and in this piece I will offer some initial considerations of causes, consequences and effects.

The main finding is that for such a deadly rupture to have taken place there has clearly been a catastrophic failure of high political leadership, not just now and not just in Washington.  How the US and its Allies mismanaged the withdrawal is the immediate cause of what by any standards of policy is a disaster.  The consequences for the Afghan people will be tragic, particularly women and children, and there will also be profound consequences for US leadership.  After what has happened not even America’s closest allies will any longer be sure Washington has the political capacity or strategic patience to stay the course of any prolonged campaign. The arbitrary manner in which the Trump administration decided to leave Afghanistan, which was confirmed by President Biden, has also gifted the Taliban a stunning victory.  A decision that appears to have had far more to do with America’s toxic domestic politics than considered US or Western security strategy, as evidenced by the unedifying blame game between presidents Trump and Biden.

Why is the withdrawal a defeat?  One of the many strange aspects of President Biden’s August 16^th speech was the suggestion that he was somehow bound by the agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban. This is not least because whilst the Americans and their Allies honoured the agreement the Taliban has not. Under the February 2020 Doha deal US forces were to have been withdrawn by May 1^st, 2021.  In return, the Taliban would break links with Al Qaeda and enter peace negotiations with the Ghani government. They did neither.  The date for completion of the withdrawal also slipped back to August 31^st which established a clear link between the withdrawal and the twentieth anniversary of 911. Given that information warfare/propaganda is a large part of what the Taliban do it clearly spurred them on to retake Kabul by 911 and helped accelerate the collapse of demoralised Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) about to be stripped of their foreign advisors in the face of an implacable enemy.  Consequently, Washington has not only handed the Taliban an unconditional victory, but afforded violent Salafist jihadis the world-over an immense propaganda coup and a powerful recruiting tool.  Such groups across will also interpret the defeat of the West as fulfilment of prophesy that a Muslim army would defeat infidels in the so-called Khorasan, which includes parts of Afghanistan

Were the US and its Allies right to withdraw from Afghanistan? President Biden said, “Today, the terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan. Al-Shabab in Somalia, al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al Nusra in Syria, ISIS are attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia. These threats warrant our attention and our resource”. And that, “There was only the cold reality of withdrawing our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back”. Twenty years on from the December 2001 invasion Western powers were certainly right to be looking to Afghans to decide their future and in a terrifying way they have, or at least had it decided for them.  It is also argued by some that the rise of China and the return of Great Power Competition meant it was simply no longer possible for the US and its Allies and partners to commit such large parts of their respective forces and resources to one central Asian country.  In fact this argument is simplistic at best.  It is true the Taliban reduced its attacks on the Coalition in the wake of the February 2020 deal with Trump and that had the US reversed that decision such attacks would likely have resumed.  However, the US and its allies have a far better understanding of Afghanistan than twenty years ago thus enabling a strategy of that was essentially one of inserting Western military back-bone into the ANSF. It is that backbone which was removed with catastrophic consequences. Moreover, over the past few years the US and its NATO Allies have succeeded in limiting the number of forces involved.  In other words, the US and its Allies should have been able to both prepare for the challenges posed by the likes of China and Russia, whilst also maintaining the mission in Afghanistan.  

Was the aim of the campaign simply to defeat terrorism in Afghanistan?  President Biden also said, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralised democracy”.  That mission was precisely what the US signed up to in December 2002 in the Bonn Agreement which was the price many Europeans demanded for committing to a long-term campaign in Afghanistan.  Back in December 2001, the West could have mounted a simple search and destroy counter-terrorism mission.  However, the West (Americans included) chose not to and decided instead to build a functioning Afghanistan that would no longer be a threat to itself or others.  That was also the promise made to the Afghan people and at the time those that made that promise believed it.  Sadly, it is that promise that has now been betrayed and witnessed the world over. The hard truth is that the West failed in its mission to create such an Afghanistan because it was never really serious in meeting the challenge of it. For the last decade presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden all signalled that they were far more concerned about how to get out of Afghanistan and thus limit any adverse impact this entangling engagement might have on their electoral chances. Europeans?  Most of them have been trying to get out since 2002, or at the very best limit their exposure.  

Could a functioning and relatively stable Afghan government have ever been established?  Probably not, albeit not simply because of the nature of Afghan politics and the endemic corruption in both Kabul and provincial capitals. Stability in Afghanistan rested on efforts by the Coalition to build governing institutions sufficiently respected and capable of governing the country for the good of all Afghans.  Those efforts were frustrated by corruption at the highest levels of government including, it is alleged, ex-President Ghani. The main argument the Biden administration is using to justify the withdrawal was that not only are Americans tired of what he called ‘forever wars’, or that Afghanistan not the threat it was (at least for the moment), but that forging competent governance in Afghanistan is not possible. However, throughout the campaign commanders also grappled with a deadly paradox: many leaders in Washington did not believe in nation-building, whilst many leaders in Europe who insisted on nation-building signally failed to invest in it. Consequently, the counter-terrorism campaign and the stabilisation campaigns ran in parallel and too often came into conflict in spite of efforts by commanders in the field to de-conflict the two missions. Consequently, in spite of the huge efforts the Americans and their allies and partners made to construct functioning institutions in Kabul they failed to extend the writ of the Kabul government across the country which many Hazara, Pashtun, Tadjik and Uzbek Afghanis alike saw as corrupt and incompetent.  The Allied effort was also too often fractured and uneven spread as it was across a host of so-called ‘provincial reconstruction teams’ all of which were different depending on which country was responsible.

Why did the ANSF fail so spectacularly? In his July 8^th speech President Biden said, “The Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped (personnel) – as well equipped as any army in the world – and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban…The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army. They’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of the embassy of the United States from Afghanistan”. From the outset the entire campaign was predicated on the belief that in time credible Afghan National Security Forces could be fashioned from the many militias that roamed the country and a shared Afghan identity would emerge that was sufficiently robust to provide effective pan-Afghanistan security.  It was the plan of the late Donald Rumsfeld and it was that plan which failed so catastrophically this past week.  NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s August 17^th claim that the collapse of the Afghan Government was due to the failure of the Afghan National Army (ANA) is thus correct but only in a very narrow sense.  The reasons the ANA collapsed are manifold and far more complex than is being presented, and not simply due to poor leadership or low morale.  Whilst the ANA had some 30,000 excellent Special Forces much of the rest of the ANA was an immature force with its Kandaks (battalions) organised around and dependent upon US command and strategic enablers, most notably air power, technology, planning and logistics.  On July 4^th much of that US core was withdrawn over a twenty four hour periof.  Moreover, contrary to what President Biden said in July the real strength of the Afghan National Army was nothing like 300,000. Part of the force was made up of so-called ‘ghost soldiers’ who simply did not exist, even though their commanders claimed their pay.  Much of the rest of the force was poorly-fed, and even more poorly-led, with much of their fuel and ammunition sold off on the black market before it ever reached them. Given that combination of factors it is hardly surprising much of the ANA melted away as the Taliban marched across Afghanistan’s four hundred districts.  Only the 201^st Corps and the 111^th Capital Division stood their ground and they were destroyed.  Crucially, over 40% of the ANA was also meant to be comprised of the Pashtun, who also form the core of the Taliban. The ‘ANA’ was only ever going to be credible as a force if the US and its Allies were there to support them for the foreseeable future.  What must now be of particular concern is the fate of the weapons and systems in the ANA’s arsenals.

Will Afghanistan once again become a safe haven for terrorism?  President Biden said, “We conduct effective counter-terrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan”.  It is certainly the case that both technology and understanding of a shifting threat have changed profoundly since 2001, but Afghanistan remains substantially the same. The heady ideological mix of Deobandi fundamentalism and the Pashtunwali code of honour suggests it could well again provide such a haven so whatever blandishments the Taliban leadership is uttering.  What will be of particular concern to intelligence officials is that the picture they have built up of Afghanistan over many years will steadily degrade.  Moreover, the Taliban are unlikely to be able to exercise control over all of the country’s territory particularly given that the next phase of the conflict will see warlords, the Northern Alliance and other tribal leaders and networks seeking to reassert their authority over their respective areas. 

Will the Great Game return to Afghanistan?  The reason British troops entered Afghanistan in the 1840s and effectively stayed for over a century was to block Russian ambitions to seize a warm water port in what was then the British Raj. Afghanistan thus became the unwilling venue for what became known as the Great Game, a grand strategic contest between London and Moscow. It is interesting the speed at which both Beijing and Moscow have moved to establish relations with the new Taliban regime, even if they have yet to formally afford it recognition. One hope is that fundamentalism is also of concern to all the Great Powers that surround Afghanistan, China, India and Russia.  Iran is also no friend of the Taliban. For twenty years the US presence has enabled them to avoid dealing with the threat posed by instability in Afghanistan, but now they will have to.  China has always had its covetous eyes on the large mineral resources believed to lie under land south of Kabul and will doubtless move swiftly to bring Afghanistan into its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Wider Consequences

What are the strategic implications for transatlantic relations? It is somewhat galling to see European leaders complain about American actions given the weakness of the European effort in Afghanistan over the past twenty years. Most Europeans were only present in Afghanistan out of a sense of obligation to the Americans following the September 12^th, 2001 invoking of NATO Article 5 collective defence.  Few of them ever really believed in the campaign and all of them in one way or another, with the possible exception of the British and Canadians, limited their commitment and their operations, particularly rules of engagement, to such an extent that a required level of unity of effort and purpose was never really achieved. The failure in Afghanistan is thus as much European as American. It should also severely challenge European ideas of security in which values and interests merge to the point where policy becomes little more than strategic virtue signalling.  If Europeans are not prepared to enter a theatre in which their interests are threatened unless they can leave the place better off then they will not go anywhere. More crucially, it is high time Europeans came of age as strategic actors because that will be the only way to save NATO.  Indeed, it is no good Europeans complaining about American policy and actions if time after time it is Americans bearing the overwhelming burden of risk and cost.

Where next for European policy? For almost three decades Europeans have been touting a values-based approach to security whilst relying on the US for their own hard defence.  Take the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy or ‘CSDP’, which should be a vital stabilising component of a broad security approach to Europe’s fractious and dangerous strategic neighbourhood.  The ability of Europeans to put an EU flag on complex operations, as opposed to a NATO, US or other national flag, remains an important political contribution to crisis management and co-operative security. However, both CSDP and ESDP have been in existence for over twenty-five years and its tiny missions bear little or no relation to the claims Brussels routinely makes for them, or the real impact they have on the ground.  It is as though Europeans are eternally practising for a return to the real world whilst never quite making it whilst expecting the Americans to defend them whilst criticising the Americans for so doing. That is in no way meant to disrespect the sadly many brave Europeans who gave their lives in Afghanistan, but the debacle therein must finally mark the bonfire of false European assumptions and strategic illusions.  European weakness is in fact European isolationism and the danger now is that the failure in Afghanistan will only reinforce the delusion that somehow soft security can substitute for hard reality, particularly where it really matters in Europe, Germany.

Was the sacrifice of so many Afghan and Coalition lives for nothing?  To answer that question it is important to go back to December 2001. The West was reeling from 911 and another such attack seemed both imminent and inevitable.  Afghanistan was an ungoverned space in which Al Qaeda was training its fighters.  The US and its Allies swiftly prevented that and for twenty years prevented Afghanistan again being used as a base for such attacks.  The campaign in Afghanistan has not been a success, but then the very idea of ‘success’ for such a mission in such a place is misplaced.  And yes, things could and should have been done a lot better, but it is hard on balance to suggest, as some are, that the sacrifice was for nothing.  What has changed are the circumstances and the nature and scope of the threat.

Options

The options are limited.  However, to mitigate this disaster the Biden administration will need to do something that might seem counter-intuitive – embrace the Taliban by holding them to the reassuring words they have been uttering over the past twenty-four hours, even on women’s rights.  Sadly, experience of those areas of Afghanistan that have been under Taliban control for some time reveal a large gap between their words and deeds.  The US and its allies will also need now to bring more pressure on Pakistan to help reign in the Taliban, even if Islamabad fears India will seek to exploit the situation in Southern Afghanistan. Yesterday, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said the Taliban victory had “broken the shackles of mental slavery” (he is a very different Imran Khan from the one I met at Oxford).  Given Pakistan’s internal contradictions Prime Minister Khan might soon come to regret what he wished for.

The US and its Allies also need to engage China, India and Russia and seek some level of common cause, particularly over the issue of terrorism. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states will also need to be persuaded to limit their funding of Madrassas (schools). If not, then Afghanistan could well, indeed, once again become a haven for terrorism and a cauldron of Great Power competition.

Above all, President Biden needs to take a long hard look at himself. It was strange listening to a US president, the leader of an administration that prides itself on human rights, particularly women’s rights, making a statement that British High-Victorian imperialist Lord Palmerston would have been proud of.  America has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, just interests?  If there is one lesson for Americans above all others from this debacle it is that it needs friends more than ever, albeit capable friends.  What the Afghanistan failure has revealed is an America and a wider West that twenty-years on from 911, and some thirty years on from the end of the Cold War, does not really know for what it fights and why, beyond vague aphorisms about happiness, prosperity and the American Way. And yet, implicit in the war in Afghanistan was a struggle between institutionalised multilateralism and red in tooth and claw Realpolitik.  

The hard truth is that the West, Americans, Canadians and Europeans alike have lost their way and no longer have any real idea of their security goals or how they should achieve them in a complex dangerous world beyond endless blah blah, particularly in Europe.  There are few principles and even less doctrine with the result that policy is inconsistent and red lines meaningless. No-one believes the West any longer has the strategic backbone or political will to enforce them. The Chinese, Russians, Iranians, Taliban and their ilk certainly do and in the wake of Afghanistan it is their anarchic vision of chaos which has far more chance of prevailing given the nature of a retreat which turned a withdrawal into a defeat and then a political rout.   

In the end Afghanistan found out the US and its Allies like it has so many before them and the implications for NATO in particular will be profound.  The Americans will refocus their attention on warfighting and ‘pivot’ (to use that ghastly phrase) towards China and preparations for some hi-tech, high-end robotic future war.  The British will go with the Americans as far as the British can, although the British will also claim they have gone far further than they actually have, just as the British always do.  The French will join them, for all their empty rhetoric about European strategic autonomy (if they can ever get over Brexit), and the Poles will be their usual brave but marginal selves.  Germany and the rest? 

The future? As Kabul was falling another event was taking place.  Seventy-five years to the day after Indian independence from Britain the INS Tabar (Battleaxe) sailed into Portsmouth, the fleet headquarters of the Royal Navy. The strategic implications are clear.  Democracies the world over face a growing range of threats and to maintain the peace nothing short of a new idea of multilateralism must now be forged.  So, the West, Europeans in particular, have a choice to make at what is clearly a point of strategic inflection because the post-Afghanistan, post-COVID world is going to be very bumpy indeed.  They can either collectively retreat into themselves and reinforce the catastrophic loss of strategic self-belief from which Western leaders are clearly suffering, or they can re-group and rebuild the Alliance for the twenty-first century by reaching out to like-minded others. That will mean having the political courage to learn the many hard lessons from the Afghanistan fiasco because the world needs democracies the world-over to continue to engage danger together.  At the very least, vacuous, risk-averse political leaders must no longer send a few well-intentioned civilian and military personnel to do their bidding and expect them to succeed if they the leaders have neither the political will nor determination to see such campaigns through.    

The West will continue to have more watches than time (to paraphrase that well-worn Afghan aphorism that also turned out to be a truism) but unless it learns again to have strategic patience and match ends and ways with means there will be more Afghanistans. There were failures and mistakes were made by commanders in the field that were inevitable given the complex nature of the place and the mission.  However, ultimate responsibility for this disaster must rest with political leaders, primarily in the US and Europe, who indeed willed the ends without the ways or the means. The men and women of both Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO International Security Assistance Force did their utmost to make flawed strategy and policy work, but they were let down by their respective capitals trying to close a political gap which was not of their making and for which many paid with their lives. Ultimately, the disaster in Afghanistan is due to a catastrophic failure of political leadership.

In August 1842, British Indian forces under General Pollock returned to Afghanistan, inflicted a massive defeat on the Ghilji as revenge for the destruction of the British column a year earlier, and in September of that year re-entered Kabul.  They also captured Dost Mohammed Khan, one of Afghanistan’s most powerful tribal leaders and the first commander of what might be called the Afghan Army. He asked his British captors a question. “I have been struck by the magnitude of your resources, your ships, your arsenals, but what I cannot understand is why the rulers of so vast and flourishing an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country”.  Neither could President Biden.  

Julian Lindley-French

 

 

The Russian National Regime Survival Strategy

 “Only a harmonious combination of strong and human well-being will ensure the formation of a just society and the prosperity of Russia. This requires concerted action to implement the strategic national priorities of the Russian Federation, aimed at neutralizing external and internal threats and creating conditions for achieving national development goals”.

The National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, July 2021

The Lubyanka complex

July 21^st.  It is the Lubyanka complex in action! The new Russian National Security Strategy is nothing if not a Siloviki-inspired exercise in self-serving Kremlin elite paranoia in which the weak get beaten and only the strong prevail in some endless race down to the zero sum.  It is a manifesto for a no-rules based international order in which only Russian might is right abroad whilst Russia's latest Strong Man is infallible at home. As a European I read the thing both little surprised and disappointed at one and the same time. 

The greatest irony about the ‘Strategy’ is tragic for it only implies what the Kremlin regards as the greatest threat to ‘their’ Russia, the Russian people. Indeed, reading the document what jumps out from the pages is not the strength of Russia or the regime, but rather the dangerous mix of profound insecurity and nihilistic cynicism that is the Kremlin world-view. A cynicism now leavened by a belief that Russia can prevail over its own myriad contradictions by systematically exploiting the openness of democracies through the sustained application of emerging and disruptive technologies in what they see as a form of grey zone ‘perma-war’ across the spectrum of information war, cyber war and the complex strategic coercion that is the threat of hyperwar.

Authoritarian incompetence

As such the strategy comes dangerously close at times to being delusional in that Russian might could be successfully combined with Moscow’s narrative of injured historical right to salami slice NATO and steadily force those in its self-styled sphere of influence into compliance.  It is that desperate sense of a regime desperate for control that comes across most lucidly in the strategy: control of the Kremlin; control of what exists of the Russian body politic; control of Russia’s resources; control of the money; control of the Russian people; and, by extension, control of Russia’s world, with its fake security organisations and alliances. If there is a vision it is one born of a sense of being under perpetual attack, of needing enemies for the Kremlin to justify to themselves and others why the Russian security state is slowly crushing what is left of civil society and taking over all levers of power – political, economic, security, military, even intellectual.  In other words, it is the world-view of a tired regime and a tired leader who offer little hope to the Russian people, little ability or, indeed, inclination to manage inevitable change, and prepare Russia for a successful future, and, critically, no mechanism when the time comes for the peaceful succession from one leader to another.  In other words, it is an exercise in desperate cynicism in which the very idea of ‘power’ at its core reveals deep weakness and which in damning Russia to a future (again) of authoritarian incompetence guarantees its own failure and future danger. 

To assure and ensure control at home this distinctly nineteenth century strategy routinely exaggerates enemies and threats both foreign and domestic. Indeed, it could have written by the anti-reform Tsars Alexander III or Nicholas II. At best, it is Alexander Gorchakov reborn, at worst the Okrhana or KGB at their worst, such is its depressing thesis.  The very threats it claims to counter justify ever more control over all aspects of Russian life, a pre-revolutionary, pre-rupture statement.  A rupture that will not happen tomorrow but one could now imagine another 1905-style Bloody Sunday as the regime moves to suppress all and any dissent in the name of 'cohesion'. President Putin is determined there will be no Russian Spring under President Putin even if his security strategy is a tacit acceptance of that very danger. 

Dark ironies

Thus, the Russian National Security Strategy of July 2021 marks the beginning of another old chapter of Russian tragedy in the style of a Dostoevsky or Pasternak, leavened, as so often in the past, with bucket loads of dark Chekhovian irony. The strategy is, indeed, a Russian tragedy for it implies the fate of Russians and Russia’s unique genius will be forever tragic because ‘order’ can only ever be guaranteed by extinguishing freedom for freedom is chaos.  And, by simply being free Russia’s Western neighbours are a threat to Mother Russia whether they have intent or not.  For the Kremlin Mother Russia’s eternal Rasputin is chaos and the West IS Rasputin, seductive, dangerous and seditious. 

The strategy also reveals Putin’s wilful lack of understanding of the Western liberal order.  For him Russians must be protected from a West that offers snake oil for fear they will be seduced and only by repeatedly demonstrating the moral, spiritual, and eventually power ‘superiority’ of traditional Russian values over the Western vacuity can such seduction be prevented.  A West which to Putin has abandoned any pretence to righteousness or rectitude by embracing what Putin regards as a toxic post-identity, post-patriotic post-modernism.  Post modernism in which the manly values of which Putin sees himself the very embodiment have been abandoned by the Western democracies for what he regards as a disastrous mix of wokeism and multiculturalism which in its assault on patriotism poses as a great a threat to Russia as any NATO weapon system.

He also believes such fissures in Western society provide him with the Great Opportunity to be the Great Equalizer whereby an ostensibly weaker Russia can keep the Western democracies permanently off balance just enough for him to exert the pressure of concentrated Russian power to effect around the margins of both the EU and NATO via the super-highways and byways of Europe’s diffuse power.  An information putsch here, a hard military pull there and decadent Western Europeans will do what Western Europeans always do – talk a lot, do very little, and eventually accommodate Russian in the vain hope that Russia will be different.  Indeed, Russia’s National Security Strategy might well have had a by-line, “sponsored by Gazprom and Nordstream 2: coming to home near you”.  Merkel’s disastrous abandonment of nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster so critically undermined Germany’s energy mix that Berlin has walked straight into a Putin trap which the Kremlin will exploit ruthlessly at the appropriate ruthless moment because that is what the Kremlin does. For Moscow exerting control over its ‘Near Abroad’ remains its number two priority (the real priorities are not in the order cited in the strategy) because it makes its number one priority so much easier: exerting control over the Russian people. Germany is about to make that a whole lot easier.

Nixon-Kissinger reversed

However, the greatest deceit (self-deceit?) in the strategy is the way it describes and justifies the Great Power Competition geopolitics it needs to impose such a security burden on the Russian people in their name. The United States is now Russia’s Great Satan responsible for much of the world’s ills and defaming noble Russia in what the strategy describes as Washington’s continuing but doomed efforts to preserve American hegemony.  Paradoxically, the way the strategy describes the Americans is perhaps the strongest metaphor of all for how the Kremlin really sees Russia.  Alright, Russia lacks the ‘corrupting’ cultural influences of the Americans because its soft cultural power does not travel well.  However, to accuse the US and wider West of constantly interfering in Russian internal affairs whilst feigning injured pride that the West should accuse Moscow of such dark arts is almost beyond parody.   

The third priority of the Putin regime, beyond controlling the Russian people and Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’ (including its NATO and EU ‘Near Abroad’ if allowed to get away with it), is the “comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction with China”. This is the stuff of Machiavelli, a reverse Nixon-Kissinger if you will, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. China is more than happy to instrumentalise and exploit Russia’s efforts for geopolitical gain, as Beijing’s July 2021 support for the Assad regime in Syria demonstrates.  However, at the same time Beijing also despises Moscow and Russia is only too aware of China’s long-term, ambitions for the Russian Far East.  Putin’s wet dream of Russia being at the heart of an aligned non-aligned ‘privileged’ relationship with India is also completely paradoxical because the closer Moscow is to Beijing the further from New Delhi. Today, the Indian Navy is exercising with the Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike Group in the Indian Ocean to “forge closer defence relations”.

The Russian National Regime Survival Strategy

The consequence of this most opportunistic of self-serving, self-interested and self-preserving ‘national’ security strategies with its mono-maniacal obsession with an imagined ‘West’ is yet more engineered emergencies on and around Europe’s borders, yet more provocation as Russian aircraft and submarines breach the territorial airspace and waters of NATO allies and EU member-states, yet more information warfare, cyber-attacks and espionage, yet more diversion of Russia’s resources away from civil society to the security state in all its Hydra-headed forms, yet more use of The Wagner Group and its not-so-mercenary mercenaries, yet more attacks on 'traitors' living in foreign countries like the March 2018 Salisbury Novichok poisonings by the GRU's Unit 29155, yet more massive offensive military exercises such as the forthcoming ZAPAD 21 that both ‘celebrate’ Russian power at home and intimidate those abroad, and yet more showpiece hyped up space and artificially intelligent hyper-weapons. All and anything the NATO allies do to legitimately deter and defend themselves against such behaviour will be routinely presented by the Kremlin as ‘aggression’ or ‘containment’ precisely because it is that narrative which is central to the regime’s survival.

How should the Western Allies respond? It is clear that Moscow will continue to push peace to the very limits with all sorts of extra-jurisdictional action.  It is also clear that China and Russia in concert will seek to make geopolitical life as hard as possible for the Americans.  First, in spite of the many post-Covid 19 pressures faced by the European Allies they must collectively recognise they are in the front-line of Great Power Competition.  Second, Britain, France and Germany must overcome their post-Brexit differences and lead Europe towards a new form of credible ‘independent’ minimum deterrence across the 5Ds of perma-war – deception, disinformation, destabilisation, disruption and destruction. Third, NATO’s Next Strategic Concept must be a determinedly proportionate response to all the acts of intimidation and threats faced by the Alliance.  Fourth, NATO leaders must understand what they are signing up to and mean it.  It is not at all clear that some of them understand the deterrence and warfighting concepts in the June NATO Summit Communique or mean them. Fifth, remember Harmel and somehow keep talking with and to Russia because deep in my consciousness there is still the hope that one day Russia will decide that a rules based order is in the Russian interest and that arms control is an essential part of Russia’s legitimate defence strategy.

Rather, reading the Kremlin’s National Regime Survival Strategy is an extremely depressing exercise in ‘here we go again’ politics in which nothing is what it seems.  It is to read history and futures bound up in one in which no lessons have been learned that are worth learning.  In which the needs of a narrow oligarchy are presented as the interests of a Great Power.  Russia IS a Great Power but the very manner by which THIS National Security Strategy defines ‘greatness’ is a sure-fire way to ensure Russia’s greatness is greatness denied.  That, perhaps, is the most depressing aspect of this strategy because it reveals a leadership that deep down does not believe in Russia nor its people, least of all in what Russia could become if even half decently led. Rather, it is the manifesto of a fearful Kremlin that having lost an empire has still to find a role beyond almighty, bloody spoiler.  As such, the Russian National Security Strategy actually says very little about Russia and its future, but everything about the regime which runs it. The best that can thus be said of it is that the Russian ‘emperor’ has new clothes.

Julian Lindley-French

China, Red Nationalism and the Xi Doctrine

 “The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try the world is beyond winning”

 Lao Tzu

The Xi speech

July 8^th, 2021. As the Royal Navy’s new Carrier Strike Group passed through the Suez Canal and ‘Global Britain’ once again headed East of Suez the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga issued a stark warning to President Xi of China: Japan will regard any attack on the Republic of China (Taiwan) as an “existential threat”.  This Analysis addresses three questions. Is a Chinese military attack on Taiwan imminent?  What are the forces driving Chinese nationalism?  What are the constraints on China?

In his speech of July 1^st to mark one hundred years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and speaking from atop the totemic Tiananmen Gate, President Xi Jingping was uncompromising. He said that the “blood and flesh” of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens would repel at attempt by the West to “bully, oppress or enslave us” and that “bloodied heads” would be the result of any interference in Chinese affairs. He also said that the re-unification of Taiwan with the Mainland was “…an historic task to which the party is firmly committed and it is a common wish of the Chinese people to resolve the Taiwan issue and achieve the total reunification of the motherland”.  Ominously, he went further, “We [China] will have a world class army so that we can safeguard state sovereignty, security and development interests with greater abilities and more reliable methods”. 

Is a Chinese military attack on Taiwan imminent?

No, but the threat posed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to Taiwan cannot be discounted.  In spite of the impressive progress in modernising China’s 2.7 million strong active service force a joint air-maritime-amphibious assault on such a scale would be an immense risk for Beijing. First, Taiwan’s forces, the Chinese National Armed Forces (CNAF), have 290,000 active service personnel which is reinforced by 1.65 million reserves.  Second, the CNAF are reinforced by 30,000 US personnel, including a sizeable contingent of Special Operating Forces or SOF.

Third, the shortest crossing between mainland China and Taiwan is 110km, or almost 70 miles.  Hitler baulked at the prospect of risking three army groups crossing the English Channel in 1940 against a British force that had just been effectively defeated at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe could not guarantee control of the air space and the Kriegsmarine had no chance of controlling the sea space against the Royal Navy, even though the distance was only 34km or 21 miles. Moreover, China could only ever use a fraction of its force for an assault on Taiwan across what would be a heavily contested space.  To reduce the risk for such an operation China has illegally militarised a series of reefs and islands around the perimeter of the South China Sea to effectively lock the US and its allies out in the event of a Chinese attack.  This is the reason quite a few Western powers regularly conduct freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea to deny Beijing any de facto, let alone de jure control over a vital strategic sea space.

Fourth, the Chinese have never before conducted such operations on anything like the scale required. Yes, they have conducted some impressive show-piece maritime amphibious exercises.  However, China lacks both blue and brown water experience and there is a world of difference between exercises and operations.  For China to undertake a D-Day plus operation without any prior experience would be an enormous military gamble in which defeat would have the most profound of political and strategic consequences.  All military operations go wrong but large air-maritime-amphibious operations normally take place in a ‘sea of wrong’ because there are so many moving parts. In the midst of such chaos it is usually experienced operational commanders who make the difference.  

Therefore, in spite of the bombast of Xi’s speech Beijing would much prefer to gradually influence Taiwan from within and create the conditions for an eventual, and relatively peaceful re-integration of Taiwan with the mainland.  Much of the effort will involve subversion of the political class, reinforced by implacable opposition to any attempts by Taipei to achieve full independence, and the use of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to exert strategic coercion.

What are the forces driving Chinese nationalism?

There is a tendency, particularly among Europeans, to consider the strategic options open to the likes of Putin and Xi through their own geopolitical myopia.  There are two forces that reinforce the need for prudence and which could lead to a military confrontation between China and the US far sooner than many anticipate: Han Chinese nationalism and the paranoia of the CCP.  It is the heady mix of Han Chinese nationalism and CCP paranoia, allied to the growing influence of the armed forces and their state enterprises that could in certain circumstances create the ‘perfect’ conditions for military adventurism, particularly if the Xi faced losing power at home.  

Nationalism is a powerful driver of policy. The Han Chinese represent some 91% of China’s population. As the ideological fervour of the Mao years receded, and particularly since Xi took power in 2012, the main source of Beijing’s power has become suppressed Han Chinese nationalism.  The result is what might be described as a ‘chip on the shoulder, this is our moment’ attitude to foreigners, particularly Westerners (Gweilo), the Japanese and the wider world.  This is hardly surprising.  From the so-called Unequal Treaties with the British in the wake of the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the Rape of Nanking in the 1930s, and the brutal Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945, the Middle Kingdom with its ancient civilisation has been treated as little more than a chattel to be shared around between conquerors.   

In spite of the appearance of total power of the CCP, which Xi’s speech tried to reinforce, the ‘Party’ remains eternally paranoid about the threat from enemies both within and without China.  It is such paranoia why Beijing broke the ‘one country, two systems’ model and the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration in which Beijing agreed to permit Hong Kong to maintain its distinct political institutions for fifty years following Britain’s 1997 withdrawal.  What makes the CCP particularly worried is a fear that Hong Kong’s protesters might trigger a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. These were not simply a consequence of the pro-democracy movement.  They were also caused by a combination of inflation, economic reform, political corruption and nepotism, all of which are apparent in China today.  In the wake of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre the CCP established a form of post-Tiananmen contract as part of the social economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era.  Put simply, the CCP created the conditions for growing prosperity so long as the newly-rich and the burgeoning middle class did not threaten the absolute control of the Party.  The sine qua non of the policy became the need to maintain economic growth and rural development at almost any cost for fear that if China stalled so would the CCP.  

What are the constraints on China?

The first constraint is President Xi’s own world-view.  Xi is a ‘Princeling of the Party’, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and Paramount Leader. He also had a tough upbringing. In an interview he gave in 2000 he said, "People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bull-pens and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level."

His reference to ‘bull-pens’ reflects his experience as a young man during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s when his father, a high ranking official, was denounced as a counter-revolutionary and thrown into prison.  At the age of fifteen, after a life of relative ease Xi was also sent to work in the countryside where he learnt how to survive and also began to learn how to ‘play’ the often brutal internal politics of the CCP.  Xi is also a Chinese patriot schooled in the immense history of the Middle Kingdom with all the associated frustrations that many Chinese feel about the lack of respect afforded China by the West and others over the centuries.  He means what he says that China will repel any attempt to “bully, oppress or enslave us” and his need for absolute control over the Party, the country and much of the world around him makes Xi’s China a potentially dangerous power that can trust nothing or no-one.  That lack of trust also extends to Putin’s Russia, a relationship which Xi is perfectly happy to instrumentalise if its helps his China secure its interests.  

However, perhaps the greatest constraint on China is Xi himself and his demand for absolute conformity.  China boomed when Deng Xiaoping managed for a time to strike a delicate balance between the centralised control of Beijing and the Party, on one side, and the entrepreneurial power of Hong Kong and Shanghai, on the other.  The latter drove the export led boom but also led to a very Chinese form of pluralism which played its part in the 1989 revolt.  The momentum from that boom is still apparent in China’s many amazing achievements over the past thirty years.  However, Chinese entrepreneurship is slowly being strangled by the imposition of Xi’s renewed statist culture that over time could well erode China’s economic dynamism.  In the wake of the pandemic the Asian democracies and the West, the main source of China’s economic power surge, are also increasingly wary of Xi’s Beijing. Rather than move to ease such concerns Xi has taken the opposite course of action and become increasingly belligerent and aggressive. This suggests that Xi is incapable of striking that balance between some personal liberty and economic activity that unleashed China’s long suppressed potential.

Does China pose a threat?

All of the above leads to a final question: does China pose a threat to the region and the world?  It could.  Xi’s power-base is the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and he ensures that they are at the core of his very concept of China the Mighty.  The PLA is thus being equipped and modernised at a quite remarkable pace shifting the global balance of military power with huge implications for the Americans and NATO that most Europeans seem quite incapable of grasping.  Much of the PLA’s leadership like Xi also have a world-view that encapsulates much that is modern China: a potent mix of Han Chinese nationalism, Party orthodoxy, and a world-view born of a sense of centuries of disrespect, injury and humiliation at the hands of powerful foreigners.  It is also a perfect recipe for political miscalculation, particularly if the domestic situation of the CCP worsens.

This essentially zero sum world view in which Xi and the Party can only survive if they control all opponents and enemies both foreign and domestic driving Xi’s ambition for China to become the dominant world power by 2049, a century after the founding of Communist China.  Indeed, Xi’s speech marking the centenary of the CCP was a road marker on the route to such power.  Such an uber-competitive world view also means that for Xi China the true test of power will be the eclipse of the US and the kow-towing of Europe and by whatever means necessary.  It is for that reason that Western powers are daily under industrial level of cyber-attack and espionage and why Beijing routinely flouts rules over intellectual property theft.  All that matters is the search for critical comparative advantage at a time and place of Beijing’s choosing. 

Is it possible to deal with China?  Yes, if Beijing is accorded the respect its power and status deserve.  However, each and every breach of a treaty and every abuse of enormous power must be responded to.  China also invented what the West today calls statecraft and tradecraft and unlike such regimes in the past, and for all the forces acting on Xi, there is also a sophistication which creates the possibility for mutual interest to be engineered, but if one presumes war with China the Chinese will one day oblige.  Before that happens all and every opportunity must be explored for relatively peaceful coexistence, even if intense strategic competition between China and the Global Democracies is inevitable.  

In other words, when dealing with a China that is steadily moving from authoritarian to totalitarian the West and its leaders must be respectful and pragmatic, but also clear-eyed and look well beyond Chinese money.  Belt and chains?  And, always carry a very big stick! 

Julian Lindley-French

Freedom of Provocation?

 “The high seas are open to all States, whether coastal or land-locked…These freedoms shall be exercised by all States with due regard for the interests of other States in their exercise of the freedom of the high seas, and also with due regard for the rights under this Convention with respect to activities in the Area”.

 Article 87, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea

The Lion and the Bear

June 30^th, 2021.  Something High Victorian took place last week in the Black Sea.  The Old British Lion gave the Old Russian Bear a poke in the eye. Shortly after leaving the Ukrainian port of Odessa, and with Kiev’s permission, the British Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender exercised its right to freedom of navigation in waters off Crimea that Moscow now claims as Russian.  The two nuclear powers growled at each other, which was really the point, although just how many teeth were really involved, and to what extent they were bared, is disputed.  Moscow claimed that one of its aircraft dropped four bombs, albeit well in advance of HMS Defender, and that warning shots were fired by two patrol vessels.  Moscow also claimed that the Royal Navy had breached international law by entering Russian territorial waters, whilst faint hearts back in London warned of the danger of provoking Russia.  Given that virtually no state recognises Moscow’s claim to Ukrainian waters Russia seized illegally in 2014 the only possible law that comes to mind is the medieval law of conquest.  In other words, the very ‘law’ the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea seeks to banish.

History also resonated.  On October 5^th 1853, war broke out between Russia, on one side, and Britain, France, Turkey and, err, Sardinia on the other.  There were many complex causes of the Crimean War but for the British side the main imperative was the Machtpolitik of empire and the need to prevent Russia expanding its influence into the Black Sea Region and wider the Middle East as the Ottoman Empire declined.  The result was a bloody five year war, much of it fought in Crimea, and a lot if it fought incompetently.  During the October 1854 Battle of Balaclava the British Light Cavalry Brigade infamously charged up the wrong valley directly into massed Russian artillery.  The ghost of British incompetence past re-appeared this week when an unnamed British senior civil servant apparently left top secret ‘UK Eyes Only’ documents relating to the Defender incident at a Kent bus-stop. If true it’s enough to make one weep. At least Britain and France eventually won the Crimean War.

Power and principle

For all the strategic theatrics last week Defender’s actions concern a fundamental principle of international law: the right to freely navigate international waters and to contest the claims of those who seize such waters by illegal means.  In that context, Defender’s actions should be seen as perhaps the first instance of the post G7 ‘community of democracies’ resisting egregious breaches of established international law by the Great Autocrats, China and Russia.  If that was indeed the intent then it was not exactly strengthened by the news that Berlin and Paris had sought to hold a summit with President Putin. The idea was quashed after several EU Member-States acted angrily to the proposal.  The Franco-German motor isn’t what it used to be? That said, in dealing with the Kremlin a Harmel-style mix of defence and dialogue is no bad thing.

The Black Sea incident could also prove to have been simply the first round of a coming strategic contest in which Beijing and Moscow use the British to send a message to the Americans. To ensure neither miscalculate the USS The Sullivans is also part of the force.  HMS Defender, along with the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen had been despatched to the Black Sea from the new British Carrier Strike Group and its flagship the heavy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is now in the eastern Mediterranean. The Group is on a twenty-eight week mission to the Indian Ocean and the Far East during which port visits will be made to India, Japan, South Korea and with history again reverberating, Singapore.  The force will also exert its international navigation rights by sailing through the South China Sea which Beijing very dubiously claims as its own.  China will have watched the Defender incident very carefully and is no doubt preparing its own ‘welcome’.  The Carrier Strike Group can expect repeated Chinese attempts to penetrate the force’s air, surface, sub-surface and cyber defences. 

Nor is Moscow finished. Russia announced a snap live fire exercise off Syria during which the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic anti-ship missile will be deployed for the first time beyond Russia’s borders on two Mig-31K (Foxhound) attack aircraft. According to Moscow they will “monitor the actions of the aircraft carrier group”.  The Kinzhal is capable of speeds of up to 12,350kph/7670mph and has a range of some 2000km/1250 miles. The Foxhounds will be supported by three Tu-22M3 Backfire strategic bombers currently deployed to the Khmeimim air base, close to the British led force.  

Cohesion and coercion

The real lesson of the Defender incident is that if Britain or any other European ally is to contest such waters with powers like Russia and China it is vital the NATO Alliance is four square behind them as part of a coherent strategy to exert (by definition) ‘legitimate’ coercion.  Yesterday, NATO Maritime Group 2 began a major exercise in the Black Sea which involves Ukraine, the US and several allies, including HMS Defender, along with 31 other allied and partner ships, 40 aircraft and some 5000 troops.  Exercise SEA BREEZE 21 is clearly designed to send a message to Moscow as well as test the Alliance’s deterrence and defence posture.  

Despatching HMS Defender on such a sensitive but important mission was a vital reminder to Russia that its seizure of Crimea and its repeated incursions into the air and sea space of NATO allies will be contested.  In a sense, Defender was giving the Russians a taste of their own vodka-laced medicine and that fact that it was the White Ensign in the Black Sea will at least have given Moscow pause for thought.  This is important because during August and September Russia will conduct the huge Zapad military exercise and, contrary to Moscow’s claims to have stood down, much of the 100,000 strong force that threatened Ukraine in March and April has not been withdrawn. 

Freedom of provocation?

On April 23^rd, 1937 in the midst of the Spanish Civil War three British freighters, the MacGregor, the Hamsterley and the Stanbrook tried to enter Bilbao carrying food supplies. To prevent their passage warning shots were fired by one of Franco’s Nationalist cruisers, the Almirante Cervera, which was operating together with the armed trawler Galerna.  British destroyers intervened but the two Spanish ships bravely pressed on until round the headland steamed the enormous British battlecruiser, HMS Hood. She trained her main 15 inch armament on the Almirante Cervera which rather sensibly stood down. The three freighters entered port safely.  The lesson?  If one is going to play gunboat diplomacy, which is what HMS Defender was doing last week, then make sure you have enough of the right gunboats in the right place.

HMS Defender is a powerful warship and her officers and ratings conducted themselves entirely in keeping with the high traditions of the Royal Navy. Equally, Defender is just one ship and the only way to properly ensure international law prevails over Machtpolitik is if the democracies collectively demonstrate the will and the capability to enforce it. In the absence of both such freedom of navigation operations will come to be seen by the autocracies as little more than a bit of publicity-grabbing freedom of provocation.  International law is not an alternative to power but rather a constraint upon it.  Therefore, the only way to uphold such law in the face of those who would subvert it is to repeatedly and collectively enforce. Are there risks? Of course.  However, history would suggest the greater risk is to take no action at all.

Julian Lindley-French