How will the world deal with the next 9/11?

A US Army commander prepares to board a C-17 cargo plane at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Monday, August 30, 2021, as the final American service member to depart Afghanistan. (Image: Master Sgt Alexander Burnett/U.S. Army via AP)

Legions of imperial soldiers had surrounded a small band of religious fanatics, just 962 strong: “No Lord but God”, the rebel slogan went; they would not submit to the authority of man. Engineers, in an effort that must have taken years, assembled a giant ramp, rising hundreds of feet from the earth towards the walls of the insurgent citadel. Food and water for the soldiers and workers were ferried, in a feat of logistics still amazing today, across miles of desert.

“The last solitary survivor, after surveying the prostrate multitude, to see whether haply amid the shambles there were yet one left who needed his hand, and finding that all were slain, set the palace ablaze, and then collecting his strength drove his sword clean through his body,” wrote the ancient historian Flavius Josephus.

The collective suicide of the zealots of Masada made its way into legend—though modern archaeologists are sceptical of its details. The empire received somewhat less kind press, but secured peace for over six decades.

“This was a vast and seemingly irrational commitment of scarce military manpower—or was it,” the scholar of strategy Edward Luttwak has asked. To those in the east who contemplated rebellion, Luttwak noted, there was a lesson: “The Romans would pursue rebellion even to mountain tops in remote deserts to destroy its last vestiges, regardless of cost.”

Masada in southern Israel. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
***

As the United States pulls out of Afghanistan, governments across the world need, more than ever, to pay attention to two key issues: why the system of nation-states which governs the world, and how they ought to be fought.

The “forever wars” ignited in the build-up to 9/11 are showing no signs of ending; indeed, the jihadist movement now controls more territory than it did twenty years ago. Even leaving aside terrorism, these wars impose costs on all states: refugee flows, organised crime, threats to trade.

The truth is, though, that the great Western powers are showing ever-greater disinclination to commit the resources—and lives—needed to discharge the centuries-old imperial obligation. Faced with the less-than-luminous results of the 9/11 wars, Western governments just aren’t willing to foot the bill.

Earlier this summer, French President Emmanuel Macron announced his intention to wind down Operation Barkhane—his country’s small-scale edition of the 9/11 war in Afghanistan—and bring back many of the 5,100 troops it now has deployed fighting jihadists in the Sahel. The reasons aren’t heard to find: the United Nations has recorded that jihadist violence is up, and has spilled from northern Mali into the country’s central region, as well as Niger and Burkina Faso.

In oil-rich Mozambique, jihadists successfully stormed the town of Palma earlier this year; the 14-year war against al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, now led by the African Union peacekeeping force AMISOM, has made no discernible progress towards stabilising the country.

Nigeria, similarly, has had little success in fighting Boko Haram, a jihadist group which has claimed thousands of lives in terrorist attacks since 2002. The insurgency has, in fact, expanded, into Niger and northern Cameroon.

Africa isn’t the only region to be suffering from an epidemic of failing states. The United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003 set off fires across West Asia, which continue to rage from Yemen to Syria and Libya. Terrorism isn’t the only threat, either: even relatively-affluent Mexico has been pushed to the edge by savage narco-cartel violence, which now claims more lives in population-adjusted terms than any theatre of jihadist violence.

For all the talk of China stepping in to fill the gap, there is no actual sign that it is willing to make the investments needed in troubled regions like Afghanistan.

In order to shape answers to this crisis, it’s important to learn the most important lesson of the 9/11 wars: force alone achieves little. The world’s militaries ought not to have been taught this lesson in Afghanistan or Iraq. Imperial Britain—contrary to its “hearts-and-minds” self-image—interned hundreds of thousands in concentration camps in Malaya and Kenya, institutionalising torture and extra-judicial executions. In both cases, though, the slaughter did nothing other than hastening British withdrawal.

Algeria and Vietnam, similarly, taught France that massive violence was often counterproductive, working to empower the adversaries it sought to stamp out.

From the bombing of Aizawl by the air force in 1966, to the burning of hundreds of homes in Sopore in 1993, and the destruction of villages in the Northeast and Bastar: India has similarly learned that coercion can create problems worse than the ones it was used to solve.

The Dalmatian rebel Bato, who led a revolt against Rome that ran for several years—and required an expensive, brutal counter-insurgent deployment—told his Imperial captors: “You Romans are to blame for this; for you send as guardians of your flock, not dogs or shepherds, but wolves.”

In general, successful counter-insurgencies have had two key resources. The first is numbers of personnel adequate to police societies on a routine, everyday basis—without resorting to the use of massive force. Even though small but sophisticated forces might subdue insurgencies, lacking adequate numbers of police, ground is soon lost to the rebels again.  The Soviet Union and United States learned this lesson in succession in Afghanistan, defeating their adversaries in each battle—but losing the war.

A general rule of thumb is that counter-insurgent forces—military and police—must maintain a ratio of 1:50 with the population; these numbers simply could not be brought to bear by Western powers in any of their campaigns, for reasons of cost and populations.

The second key resource that counter-insurgencies must be able to build is civil institutions, and recruit significant sections of the population—in particular, élites—to accept the authority of the state. These require extensive bureaucratic and political elements.

In Afghanistan, both the Soviet Union and United States were unable to build enduring state structures that could intervene in the administration of everyday life; both lacked a significant cadre of administrators who could be deployed for this purpose overseas.

“It is more difficult to govern a province than to acquire one,” the Roman poet and orator Julian Florus noted, “for they are conquered by force, but they must be retained by law.”

There is no great imagination needed to see why great power interventions have lacked these resources. Empires intervened, for the most part, in resource-rich regions where revenues could be extracted; in many modern theatres of violence, Western states have had no realistic prospect of returns on their investments. The price of intervention, put crudely, outweighs the potential costs of doing nothing: for all the public furore it ignites, the strategic costs of a few terrorist bombings are negligible compared to the financial outlays needed for long-term counter-insurgency.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, there’s little chance the United States will be willing to deal with the messy business of policing the world: a youth cohort that is, for the first time in a century, poorer than its parents, has little interest in slogans of the country’s global power and prestige.

For all the talk of China stepping in to fill the gap, there is no actual sign that it is willing to make the investments needed in troubled regions like Afghanistan. Long-promised Chinese investments in Afghanistan’s minerals sector have come to nothing; the costs of building the necessary roads and railways proved to exceed even the most optimistic estimates of returns.  Although Beijing’s investments in high-risk regions of Africa are great, it has shown no appetite for protecting them with the sword.

We are, for better or worse, at a turning point in world history, where the Great Powers are stepping back from their traditional role as upholders of order.

As 9/11’s twentieth anniversary looms, nation-states should be considering how they will deal with the next crisis.  The answer almost certainly lies in building multinational frameworks, where nation-states collaborate in sharing the financial and human costs of long wars and counter-insurgencies. New Delhi has the opportunity to take a lead.