The Taliban were thugs who brutalized an entire nation under the cover of Religion. They destroyed the institutions. They destroyed the economy. There was nothing "collectivist" about them. They were no "Peoples State." They were of, by and for the clerics. They reminded us of Pol Pot and made the thugs running Burma look positively Jeffersonian. Calling them "left" or "right" is a pedantic exercise.
From Eliot A. Cohen, "A Tale of Two Secretaries", FA, v81, n3, pp45-46.
foreignaffairs.org
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WELCOME TO THE MIDDLE AGES
Behind the need for new kinds of officers lie the changes that are taking place in war itself. The wars of the past were fought by armies organized, trained, and equipped for the kind of conflict that dominated international politics from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the end of the twentieth century. This was war waged predominantly by states, for national or ideological purposes, and fought by armies that generally resembled one another.
When colonial or counterinsurgency conflict presented a different paradigm of war, states generally coped by adjusting or adapting their regular conventional forces. Some did well (the British in Malaya), some poorly (the Soviets in Afghanistan), and some turned in a mixed performance (the United States in Vietnam). Still, the dominant form of military power consisted of large forces equipped for an all-out contest of limited duration.
Today, however, war is changing, and an analogy with medieval warfare helps to show how. In the Middle Ages a variety of entities waged war -- states, to be sure, but also crusading movements, religious orders, principalities, and entrepreneurs. Today, the al Qaeda terrorist network and the military contractor Brown & Root [Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton, a Texas energy company Dick Cheney led until becoming Vice President in 2001] are each manifestations of the dispersal of war beyond the exclusive precincts of the state. In contrast to the modern era, moreover, when war has flowed from realpolitik, national ambition, or ideological fervor, war in the Middle Ages emerged from an even broader array of motives: state or personal ambition, religious fanaticism, or sheer banditry. And where modern armies resemble one another closely in their organization and equipment, medieval military institutions looked as different as did the individual warriors -- the ponderous knights of western Europe, the highly specialized English longbow archers, or the doughty Swiss pikemen. Whereas modern warfare has tended toward well-defined beginnings and endings, finally, medieval war ebbed and flowed over decades and more, in pulses of violence, siege, and wary truce.
In one respect, however, such analogies break down. In the twenty-first century, characterized like the European Middle Ages by a universal (if problematic) high culture with a universal language, the U.S. military plays an extraordinary and inimitable role. It has become, whether Americans or others like it or not, the ultimate guarantor of international order -- something quite different from what it was only a few years ago as the leader of a coalition of free states against the well-defined threats of the Cold War. |
