The Afgan Surge - A Case Study in Assimilation

This is a very thought-provoking book - highly recommended for students of World Affairs, especially people who like to see how decisions are actually made in "high places". There are many lessons to be learned from the story. Here, I just want to quickly point out a few observations from the viewpoint of "dragon theory".

In dragon theory, it's important to identify (as much as possible), the dragon, the assimilated humans and the process whereby humans are assimilated. This differs from other methods of analysis, which simply tell the stories of the stake holders (or a tiny subset of the stakeholders) with the idea of assigning blame or handing out medals.


THE DRAGON

The premise of dragon theory is that human organizations take on a "life of their own", an epiphenomenon. They are more than the sum of the "stake holders" that create them. There is a morass of human error in this story (it's a classic case study for "Being Wrong" as well. Lots of very intelligent, hard working, well intentioned people - some may argue "the best of the best" -- appear in this story and illustrate a stunning range of human capabilities and shortcomings. There is a lot of "group think", a lot of back biting, a lot of naked ambition. It's a political story so it's all about politics - that uniquely human form of behavior. It's a story of how the best and brightest somehow manage to come to a completely wrong decision by ultimately agreeing to poke their collective heads in the sand.

But that's not what I'm looking at. For better or for worse, It's a good thing when humans attempt to chart the course of history, even though they are horribly inept at it. Dragon theory claims that there are other living things in this world who decisively affect the course of history with little or no regard for human welfare.

The "Dragon" in this story is the US Defense Establishment. The hammer is conveniently mis-named, since nothing in the Afghan surge will actually "defend" anybody, most definitely not the US public.

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

The characters in this story are the "carpenters". The debate is almost entirely about how to use the hammer: how hard to hit, where to hit, how big a hammer to use and so on. Few of the characters in the story consider diplomacy to be a "tool" at all. unassassinated human beings are seem as irrational, unreliable, corrupted and unfathomable (as are all human beings). The actual human beings they are trying to save (Afghans) are treated like some kind of amorphous fluid -- a fluid somehow distinct from the poisonous fluid of afghan citizens who actually happen to be Taliban.

The obvious fact that Afghanistan is in the throes of a civil war and that the US has now found itself on the side of corruption and incompetence instead of the Taliban is an accident of history. The Taliban were the "good guys" when the dragon was loosed to rid Afghanistan of the communist scourge.

The chosen hammer (military force) the "hammer" is alive. In spite of proving ultimately useless and increasingly dangerous since (at least) the end of World War II, it thrives and grows. Killing millions of people, absorbing vast resources. 

ASSIMILATION

In Dragon Theory, Assimilation is the process whereby humans are "absorbed" by the dragon, devoting the best of their energies - even their lives - to make the dragon thrive and grow, or at least survive to fight another day. In the "Obama" story, we see assimilation at work:

• Most of the characters around the table have won their sets by exceptional military experience. They are hammer wielders. They are deeply concerned with advancing their influence and status within the power structure.
• The "military types" are tragically unable to think "outside the dragon". For example, General Patraeus,  sees his experience in Iraq (the "surge") as relevant to Afghanistan. In his mind, it's a success. A military success. These days, we would lay at part of the blame for the plague of ISIS at the feet of Patraeus.  From the point of view of ordinary Iraqis, Patraeus was just another hammer-wielder, smashing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis until they were (temporarily) not a problem for the occupying troops.
• The "success" of the "surge" is taken as axiomatic throughout the discussion. The planners fail to see the difference between the "success" of real people and the "success" of the dragon. The Iraq war (and other military disasters such  Vietnam war and the Afghan war) allow the dragon to thrive, but cost the US tax payer billions and destroy the "theatre" of war for any human beings who have the misfortune to live in it. But the dragon thrives - gets bigger and more dangerous with every encounter. War is never a success for human beings caught up in it.

There are many threads in the story that illustrate how assimilation allows the dragon's "immune system" to ward off threats to its "metabolism". For example, it is repeatedly pointed out that military action in Afghanistan was futile, inappropriate and doomed to failure, mostly due to factors that make sense to human beings:

• The US knew next to nothing about the "enemy". How many were there? What were their goals? How much had they already succeeded? In effect, this meant that the US was going around whacking in the dark with it's "hammer", gleefully counting deaths as "progress".
• Karzai was well known to be mentally unstable, unreliable and deeply corrupt. Yet, the stated goal was to (maybe, sort of) "stand up" the Karzai government. As the story unfolds, the Karzai government is irrelevant to the final decision. The dragon is used, in spite of its track record in "standing up" governments in Iraq and Viet Nam. Ultimately Karzai blames the entire situation on the US, coming out as an implacable foe of the US. Surprise!
• Pakistan is frankly seen as the main danger -- ultimately "Islamists" with nuclear weapons. It actively supports the Taliban while happily accepting huge amounts of military aid. The paradoxical duplicity of the Pakistanis is a human consideration that is ultimately pushed aside to allow the dragon to be let off its leash. The real danger of having American cities destroyed by nuclear terrorism is what keeps Obama up at night, yet the likelihood of this human tragedy is actually advanced by getting the dragon to force Al Qaida out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and (ultimately) all over the world.

I'm sure that hundreds of books will be written about all the human failings that lead to (let's face it) the US defeat in the Afghan war. I'm just saying that we should never forget the big winner - the dragon. Nobody has suggested disbanding the US Defense Establishment just because of it's unbroken history of destroying ordinary human lives for no sane reason.

The Taliban itself is another interesting dragon, but it hardly features in this story. They really don't know enough about it to make it anything but a shadow lurking off stage. I have written about ISIS - a close relative of the Taliban dragon here. It seems that very little thought was given to the nature of the Taliban dragon in the course of deciding to send a 30,000 troop "surge" against it. I can only assume that individuals assimilated in the Taliban dragon have an equally interesting story to tell. It would be a story of success in Afghanistan, encouraging that dragon to thrive, increasing in size and power. Like the US Defence Department, it will grow at the expense of ordinary human values.

STAKE HOLDERS - THE ASSIMILATED

Dragons rise out of the swamp of human society (and to a large extent out of the resources available, but that's another story). It is a mistake to consider only those who imagine themselves to be in control of the dragon (in this case, the US Generals). This inevitably leads to an attitude of moral judgement against those who are supposedly "in control" or perhaps "lost control" if they ever had it. The damage done is done by the dragon itself. An analogy might be to "blame" a murderer's brain when actually it was his finger that pulled the trigger. Paradoxically, this can lead to the idea that the "brain" of a criminal is "sick". Recently, people have begun to look at criminality as a process that involves interrelationships between a wide range of "stake holders". For example, the trigger may have been pulled in a drug-related indecent, which involves the consumers of drugs in a system of interrelated dependency.

Vast and varied stake holders assimilated to varying degrees in the US Defense Establishment. They include:

• A society that virtually demands that big questions be simplified to talking points. Bad guys. Good guys. Terrorism. Boots on the ground. Historically, this has tended to frame the debate around how much food to feed the dragon and where to send it next.
• An intellectual elite that promotes pre-conceived ideas in favor of analysis of the messy details. 
• Producers and consumers of bullshit. At every turn, great efforts are made to "spin" the situation into something that fits the political discourse  (battle of talking points). The US public eats this crap up. Any politician who attempts to inject a bit of subtlety and complexity into the argument (such as Joe Biden or John Kerry) is pushed aside.
• A robust economy that can afford to feed the dragon vast sums -- a significant portion of the GDP of the host country.
• Soldiers who check their morality at the door, handing their souls to the dragon. They are almost universally unaware of the fact that their "leaders" are as ignorant of the facts on the ground as they are and even more likely to make catastrophic mistakes due to ordinary human weakness. They have deliberately become components of a machine. The machine itself will thrive. The damage it does will be blamed on assimilated humans -- especially the leaders but sometimes even on the poor slobs that did nothing more than trade their souls for a uniform.
• Technocrats. Technology has no morality. People who earn their living by technology (either in the laboratory or the factory floor) simply increase the power of their dragon "customers" without injecting a sliver of human value into the process. In the situation discussed here, availability drone technology has a decisive effect on the decision, illustrating the way that "high tech" is part of the dragon metabolism.

What all these "stake holders" have in common is the way their influence on the dragon does not contribute to any kind of human values in the dragon itself. The dragon is a machine.