Guns or Butter

One of the sections of the Washington Post that I try and read most closely and most religiously is the Outlooks section. The Sunday Post is a bit of a guilty pleasure, because I should be doing more to get things done on Sunday instead of sitting around in a pair of shorts and just reading.

But I came across this article about Afghanistan and the current military-political situation.

Two things jumped out at me. One, this guy is a heck of a writer because look at his opening two grafs:

On a highway north of Kabul last month, an American soldier aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked, I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat.

I had served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and in Iraq in 2003, but this was my first time on the other end of an American machine gun. It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either, and it reminded me that heavy-handed military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.

Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.

The second paragraph is exactly the type of thinking that hasn't happened enough. In the famous "battle for hearts and minds" that is what is most important, according to our military leaders, I know that I forget to think about it that way. And yeah, there is no way that I'm going to stare down the business end of a fully automatic machine gun and like the person shooting it at me. No way, that's way too frightening.

A lot of officers and people thinking about it do get that. That's why we have success when we remember these things, why Coke, MTV, jeans and American fashion have taken over the world. They're what people want.

That's not to say that sometimes you don't need to have people looking down the business end of a machine gun. There is a huge place for that, and, as we saw after the U.S. Embassy bombings and the lack of American response (thank you Bubba ... go with the light intern version next time), it's the only thing that makes radical Islam respect us. They see a lack of military response as being weak. We need "force projection" and it's worked to keep any terrorist attacks from coming over since we started using it. For that, my congratulations and thanks to the members of the Armed Forces who understand that and want to be over there. Godspeed.

The second point that the article raised for me though was that the Romans knew this. Here's the graf that made me think it most obviously:

Consider, for example, the question of roads. When U.N. teams begin building new stretches of road in volatile Afghan provinces such as Zabul and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress and villagers begin to see the benefits of having paved access to markets and health care, the Taliban attacks become less frequent. New highways then extend the reach of the Karzai administration into previously inaccessible areas, making a continuous Afghan police presence possible and helping lower the overall level of violence -- no mean feat in a country larger and more populous than Iraq, with a shaky central government.

Isn't this what the legendary aphorism summed up so nicely: All roads lead to Rome? Why did the Romans build all those roads that linked everything together? Yes, partly it was to allow their centurions and Legions to march all over quickly, and in force, taking out any large population center. But it was also for the points that Nathaniel Fick makes, in that they realized that the Roman culture spread along the roads, allowed trade, and made everyone better off, reducing drastically the likelihood that Roman forces would have to march down them.

It's a lesson that those Centurions, standing in a building consciously built to mirror the marble of Roman architecture in a city that recalls the glories of Rome, can drive home to the next group of policy wonks getting off their Metro trains and heading to work on Capitol Hill every morning: the mix is what matters.

(If you want to learn more about Roman strategy in warfare, I highly recommend, as do most historians, Edvard Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. Forces have a place, but so does peace.)