With all the discussion of the official end to US combat operations in Iraq, a key point for critics and proponents of the war and the current President is whether we have really won. Indeed, approximately 50,000 American troops remain and Iraqi on Iraqi violence still occurs all too frequently. However, as the previous seven years of debate on this war has shown us, victory will not be absolute nor obvious, disappointing many Americans still conditioned to expect WWII or Cold War style total victory. Reading the news the last few days, it occured to me, the 21st century will be a century of us deciding what and when victory is.

This may seem like an obvious, if not trivial point, however in some ways it was a moment where one’s expectations are completely redefined. Clear cut victory in the future will be a rare exception regardless of what combination of state and non-state actors are involved. Above all, Americans have a long seated cultural preference for absolute victory. We have difficulty seeing the world in shades of gray and our history and values preclude us from generally accepting small wars with expressly limited goals. And yet, that’s exactly what we’ll now be faced with.

We’ve already won in Afghanistan as far as this author is concerned, the question is when a generally accepted definition of victory will be found and we can leave.

I recently met and spoke with a British military officer who is on the verge of retirement after more than 38 years in the service of Her Majesty. I was interested to hear his opinion on serving in the military, especially in the changes that he witnessed over four decades.

The officer basically broke down his service into two periods—during the Cold War, and after the Cold War. He had fond memories of the two decades immediately after he joined the service, and enjoyed postings at bases across the globe. Starting in the early 1970s, the British had bases across Europe, several in the Middle East, and more in the Far East. The officer spent years in Germany, Bahrain, Oman, and Hong Kong. He saw action in the first two decades was in the Falklands and the Persian Gulf War, two conflicts that were relatively brief, and which were marked by excellent inter-branch cooperation.

But in the second two decades of service, things changed. With the end of the Cold War, British bases in Europe and beyond were “downsized,” and as economic and political cooperation increased with the development of the EU, military cooperation declined as the importance of NATO waned. The lifting of the Cold War pressure also meant that the different branches of the military focused less on cooperation and more on challenging each other for budgets and attentions. This meant that the post-Cold War conflicts for the British military—from Bosnia to Basra—were, in the officer’s view, poorly fought because the different branches could not communicate nor cooperate.

And from a lifestyle perspective, the officer felt that the “good” postings were gone. Overseas garrisons have largely been dismantled and downsized, and the personnel in the Armed Service today are most likely to find themselves in messy occupational duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. Back in the 1970s, it was more likely to end up in Europe or the Middle East in an experience where the officers had an enjoyable experience and exposure to different cultures. The officer also had a harsh critique of “Peacekeeping,” which would continue to survive because it was so politically tasty and publicly acceptable, but which was in fact a nightmare for the boots on the ground, doing work that they were not trained for in environments that demanded much more concentration on opaque local affairs that soldiers simply would never master.

It’s always easy for the older generation to say that things were better back in the good ol’ days, but the eloquent critique of today’s military from an experienced officer gave me plenty of food for thought. Did he have anything positive to say? Yes—the post-Cold War had resulted in improved training of military forces across the globe, and this had resulted in a real improvement in the quality of soldiers. The officer had completed rotations with soldiers in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and he saw real material improvements in the conduct of the forces in his time there. What’s more, he overwhelmingly found the soldiers that were trained really enjoyed learning how to be professional. That’s a topic that our Robert D. Kaplan has discussed before—see, for example, the article from 2005 titled America’s African Rifles.

Since resigning from office in 2008, former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf has been living in self-imposed exile—mainly in Abu Dhabi. That he is in Abu Dhabi has not widely been publicized in the English press, but the UAE is home to a number of Pakistanis and several of them have told me about running into him. He is rumored to be a guest of Sheikh Khalifa, ruler of Abu Dhabi and President of the UAE, living in one of the Sheikh’s gorgeous homes.

Musharraf in Dubai in January 2010

A close colleague from Pakistan working in Dubai and clearly (to me) a member of Pakistan’s uppermost of upper class, recently met Musharraf at a Ramadan iftar (breaking of the fast) dinner. As my colleague has a very low opinion of Musharraf, I was not surprised to hear that his impression was awful. Musharraf came across as arrogant and crass, extremely self-centered, and was quick to get drunk on Scotch whiskey (“Why do all those old military guys like whiskey?”). The more he drank, the more he spoke openly about how he was ready to lead Pakistan again.

Sound funny? Musharraf reluctantly resigned after striking a bargain to obtain a pardon for violating the constitution and possibly facing charges of treason. But with the unpopularity of the XX government, he has formed his own political party (in the UAE) and as recently as this week is trying to make himself into a figure to rally around to deliver aid to Pakistan during the current flood disasters. We should watch his future actions with interest—his political career may well not be finished.

Read the whole thing here. Thanks to Bryce for the link.

It seems natural for countries such as Egypt and India to have those names. But what we don’t realize is that the names that we use for these countries actually have no connection to the modern country but in fact take their name from historical names of countries that no longer exist.

Take Egypt. The ancient Egyptian name of the country is Kemet,, and the modern Arabic name of the country is Misr (or Masr), a word with Semitic origin. Egypt comes from the the Latin Aegyptus, which in turn derives from the ancient Greek Aígyptos, which means “below the Aegean [Sea]”.

Then in the Caucasus, ethnic Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi, their land Sakartvelo, and their language Kartuli. Georgia comes from a belief that came back to Medieval Europe from the Crusades that the country is the home of St. George, a Roman Christian martyr. And in Armenia, the native name for the country is Hayk, which in the Middle Ages was extended to Hayastan, by addition of the Iranian suffix -stan (land). The name Armenia derives from old Persian and Ancient Greek.

Modern-day Iran was known as Persia for centuries, following the name of the ancient Persian Empire that the Greeks know. Yet the people of that country have called their country Iran since Roman times, and it was not until 1935 that the country became known as Iran internationally. Part of the reason was that the Shah at the time, reluctantly subordinate to both Russia and Britain, sought to identify his country with the homeland of Germany, which had adopted the Aryan race as their national myth.

The name India is derived from the name of the Sindhu (Indus River) and has been in use in Greek since Herodotus in the 4th century BC. As it happens, the lands comprising the Indus Valley are presently entirely in Pakistan, this being the only region ancient Greeks had contact with (and in which Alexander fleetingly took control of during his conquest of Asia. The term appears in Old English as early as the 9th century, and again in Modern English since the 17th century.

How do these people feel about having such different international names? Indians accept the name India as one title of their country. Georgians are also pleased to be associated with St. George. Armenians and Egyptians appear indifferent. But there are some Iranians who are offended by the use of the word Persia from both a religious and ethnic nationalist viewpoint, as it was a pre-Islamic.

The historical ones that is. The New York Times gives a short history of Sir Francis Younghusband’s expedition to open trade with Tibet, and the storming of Gyantse in 1904. The history comes from the usual source, but what is interesting in the article is how how the Chinese communist government uses this history to “re-educate” and integrate Tibet into Greater China:

These days, Gyantse resembles other towns in central Tibet. Its dusty roads are lined with shops and restaurants run by ethnic Han migrants, whom many Tibetans see as the most recent wave of invaders. But Chinese officials prefer to direct the world’s attention away from that and to the brutal events at Gyantse in 1904, which conveniently fit into their master narrative for Tibetan and Chinese history. The Chinese government insists Tibet is an “inalienable” part of China, and it has appropriated the 1904 invasion as another chapter in the long history of imperialist efforts to dismantle China — what the Communist education system calls the “100 years of humiliation.” In that Communist narrative of Gyantse, the Tibetans are a stand-in for the Chinese who were victimized by foreign powers during the Qing dynasty.

The “you should be grateful we invaded you to protect you from those invaders” line is typical form for the Chinese government, so none of this will be new to our readers. But if you are unfamiliar with the historical Younghusband and Curzon, I recommend reading the NYT article.

Younghusband posing in front of expedition leaders in 1904

In recent years Saudi Arabia has pursued a program of economic diversification and reform. These reforms have enabled Saudi Arabia to rise substantially in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index. Saudi Arabia was ranked the 38th easiest place to do business in 2007, and rapidly climbed from there—reaching 23rd place in 2008, 16th in 2009, and 13th (!) place in 2010. That ranking makes Saudi Arabia the number one place do do business in the entire Arab World and the Middle East, and ahead of the two leading countries in the region generally deemed to be business-friendly, Bahrain and the UAE. According to Jamal Haidar, an Omani national and the co-author of the Doing Business Report in 2008:

“This year Saudi Arabia made bold business reforms making it one of the world’s leading reformers. Saudi Arabia is now the top ranked economy in the Middle East. We expect these reforms will continue to position Saudi Arabia as a business-friendly economy.”

Having done some work in Saudi, my colleagues and I regularly wonder how much did Saudi Arabia bribe Jamal Haidar or the World Bank? That’s a strong position to take without any evidence indicating bribery, but from any objective perspective, Saudi Arabia is a nightmare when it comes to doing business. Let’s consider just a few basic key issues, and compare the situation in Saudi Arabia to that of the UAE, home of Dubai and Abu Dhabi:

• The legal system is opaque, rooted in the scholarly interpretation of Sharia law, and the rules of law are of secondary importance to the whims of bureaucracy. By contrast, while the UAE is not England, but it has a more understandable and accessible legal system and dozens of “free zones” have their own legal systems that are further clarified. Furthermore, Sharia is not part of the non-family civil laws in the UAE.
• It is very difficult to obtain a visa to enter Saudi Arabia, even for a simple business trip by an American or European national. It is almost impossible for an unmarried woman to obtain a visa or to work in the country. By contrast, the UAE has nationals working there from across the globe, with a very fluid labour market, and it is rapidly become a global transit hub, granting 30 day visas to most persons on their initial arrival.
• ‘Saudization’ requirements mean that, by law, half of all employees must be Saudis, and they essentially cannot be fired. These requirements can change if you get the right person to chat over coffee with someone at the Ministry of Labour, showing once again the absurdity of the legal system. In the UAE, these local national employee (Emiratization) requirements are generally as low as 2-10% of a company’s workforce and are rarely enforced.
• Saudi Arabia’s work week is Saturday through Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday as the weekend and thus offset from the work week of the rest of the world. Also, the country shuts down during the daily prayer times, on Fridays, the holy month of Ramadan, and two weeks during the Eid festivities. Most other Middle Eastern countries have a work week of Sunday through Thursday, which is less disruptive for global businesses, and many countries have recently switched to that work week.
• Bribery remains a common way of winning government contracts and greasing the wheels. While this happens across the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is particularly notorious in this regard.

Peter Bakvis, author of a report that criticizes the World Bank guide from a labor standards perspective, notes that:

Countries can practice routine violations of [International Labour Organization’s (ILO) core labour standards (CLS)] and still win top marks in Doing Business’s labour indicators. Thus, Saudi Arabia is granted the best possible score of 0 for both “difficulty of hiring” and “difficulty of firing”, despite having outlawed trade unions and collective bargaining and not permitting women to work in several occupations.

The final word on Saudi Arabia is this—while it has made substantial reforms that have improved it drastically from where it was a decade ago, it remains an unsophisticated country mired in tribal mentalities, where nepotism is the rule and connections make or break businesses and deals. It has a very, very long way to go before it can be considered a business-friendly country.

One of my favourite podcasts Philosophy Bites recently featured a political philosopher, Raymond Guess, that made me begin to rethink my take on political realism.

He describes three different senses in which the term “realism” is used. The first is the philosophical sense in terms of how we perceive reality. The second is the International Relations (IR) Theory sense which is about how nations act only upon their interests to increase their power. Guess explains that realism in political philosophy doesn’t mean either of those things. His sense of realism is an attempt to not be deceived or not to engage in wishful thinking about the world. In other words: to see the world how it truly is. This type of realism is practised in politics in the following two ways:

1) to uncover the lies we tell to ourselves and to others (ie. wishful thinking)
2) to uncover ideological structures

In other words Guess is arguing for a realism that is not ideological, but closer to the scientific realism of understanding reality. It is an argument for transparency, pragmatism and honesty in politics. Ideologues on both the right and the left might argue that they are doing just this, since they expressly already know “how the world works”. But their failure is found in their a priori world view. Furthermore, their ideology is often easily exposed.

We do see events of “accidental realism” (reminds me of Nick Denton’s quote that Gawker Media “may inadvertently commit journalism.”) coming from traditional ideologues: hard-hitting investigative journalism, documentary films and the like. However these acts are often not given the credit they deserve as they are viewed through an ideological lens. A true practitioner of political realism would not overlook these acts.

Guess’s realism is a scientific approach to politics. Whether or not this approach is generally attainable considering our partisan, emotional political-media-industrial complex, is an interesting debate that should be had. In the meantime, for those of us analysing politics on the edge, I think this is an approach well worth adopting.

Listen to the entire podcast below or download it directly from here.

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I recently picked up an old friend, Jared Diamond’s Collapse. As I sit in the glorious comfort of Dubai, where I walk towards the titanic Burj Khalifa everyday, I can’t help but find stronger arguments in Diamond’s thesis about the limits of human civilization. Yet what Diamond has me rethinking now is not the fall of human society but first contact, an issue I considered on this blog years ago—when primitive societies suddenly encounter people from technologically advanced civilizations.

In Disney’s movie, Pocahontas , an Amerindian “princess” romances the explorer John Smith and stops a war between the British settlers and the American natives. This sanitized fairytale of our history is in fact far from a real first contact experience. Experience and history suggests that first contact between civilizations, both ancient and modern, was not nearly so friendly (with the exception of some isolated island encounters). Yet how are we to imagine the first contact between ancient Babylonians and Hittites? Or Romans and Gauls? Did they shout “hello!” or draw swords?

Jared Diamond has some experience with such first contact situations and suggests they may often have been hostile and dangerous. From his book Collapse:

Over the course of my biological fieldwork in New Guinea I have lived through such “first contact situation,” as they are called, and I found them dangerous and utterly terrifying. In such situations, the “natives” initially regard the Europeans as trespassers and correctly percieve that any intruder may bring threats to their health, lives, and land ownership. Neither side knows what the other will do, both sides are tense and frightened, both are uncertain whether to flee or to start shooting, and both are scrutinzing the other side for a gesture that could hint that the others might panic and shoot first. To turn a first-contact situation into a friendly relationship, let alone to survive the situation, requires extreme caution and patience.

What should we think of the choice to greet or fight a new civilization? Diamond focuses on the importance of a friendly relationship because the subject is how the Norse settlers in Greenland and their failure to learn from the Inuit how to hunt and survive. But treating new emissaries from a stronger civilization too kindly could result in subjucation and extinction, as Christopher Columbus writes of his first encounter with natives in the West Indies:

They willingly traded everything they owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

How a small civilization going about its business deals with a sudden first contact with a previously unknown, technologically superior civilization, is called by anthropologists the Outside Context Problem—an event almost unimaginable until it happens—and can seal the society’s fate. The vast majority of such smaller civilizations were destroyed or assimilated, while a very few survived. The most successful of such situations was probably the Japanese encounter with Perry and his black ships in the mid-19th century, and the decision of feudal to Japan to adopt education, government, medicine, technology, and military tactics from the West.

The Handbook of 5GW, edited by our blogfriend Dr Dan Abbott, and contributed to by your correspondent and a number of other blogfriends, has been released on the Kindle! Buy early and buy often. The dead tree edition will be released anon.