By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Goths. Vandals. Huns. I bet you experienced a twinge of distaste as your eyes passed over those names. That’s not surprising. They were enemies of Rome, and our sources for the history of the period are Roman. I’d be willing to bet that the same nose-wrinkling occurs when you encounter a reference to the Taliban.
Back in the fifth century A.D. Rome was an over-extended status quo power (divided into Eastern and Western wings) on the defense against the resurgent and/or newly arrived peoples on its periphery. The crux: too many challenges, not enough divisions. The Vandals had seized half of North Africa, including Carthage. The Goths were in control of much of what’s now Spain and more. The Huns, or at least a formidable branch of them, had settled into the Hungarian steppe. Settled is the operative word. They were no longer nomadic. They were trading with their more powerful neighbors and, up to a point, they were often happy to accept tribute in gold instead of wiping out populations. Not that they wouldn’t go on a rampage if crossed.Christopher Kelly, author of The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome, calls the Huns’ emphasis on tribute a “protection racket.” Think of it as a money-making scheme not so different from the extortions of many post-ideological insurgent groups today. Threatened entities pay up to ward off death and destruction, thus strengthening and emboldening the very forces they fear. (The Huns' racket is also reminiscent of the process by which U.S.-hired contractors and sub-contractors pay Taliban units for safe passage. The supplies reach our troops, but the enemy gets the funds to buy countervailing armaments.)
At any rate, Rome had serious problems. Bad enough they had in the Huns a formidable enemy. Worse, the Roman leadership clung to a cliched, mythologized image of the enemy. Kelly shows how the Hun descriptors used by an influential late 4th century A.D. Roman historian derive from the fanciful evocations of the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE.) and, for that matter, Homer’s Odyssey (9th-8th century BCE). To simplify: barbarians are beasts or monsters. Huns are barbariens. Ergo....
Unfortunately, there are no written records in the Hunnic language, which, even as a spoken tongue, is extinct. But one Priscus was sent from Constantinople on an embassy to Attila’s court in 449 A.D. Based on his experiences, Priscus wrote A History of Attila in eight volumes. ( It was published too late to do any good strategically.) Thanks to mindlessly brutal pruning in the tenth century, only 35 fragments of the old manuscript survive to our times, but what’s left, according to Kelly, allows us a glimpse of Attila’s capital and court at the time of the end game, not long before the so-called barbarian invasions reduced the Western Roman empire to a peninsular affair with borders not so different from modern Italy’s.
As I read Kelly’s conscientious revisionist portrait of Attila, trying to keep all the wars, battles and personalities straight, I found my view of Attila transformed. I also found myself thinking of the amorphous war in Afghanistan and the fact that it’s only one of the wars the U.S. is waging, overtly or covertly, against militant Islam. Like Rome’s, America's efforts lack strategic coherence and sustainability . The U.S. doesn't have enough armies or fractions of armies to operate, simultaneously, in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, to say nothing of the mess involving Israel and the war that is likely to erupt in southern Sudan when the referendum on independence for the South is tallied. Like Rome, we rely on more or less unsavory proxies and more or less unwilling allies to deal with a protean enemy, and still we must extract troops from one shakily controlled locale to reinforce another.
The U.S. isn’t poor. It’s still the richest country in the world. Ditto Rome back then. But as Rome was acquiring and consolidating its empire, the world was changing. Long before Attila became leader of the Huns on the Hungarian steppe, Rome was on the defense in every quarter. Rome's armies had become border police. Tribes that had been pushovers in earlier times had acquired new technologies, more sophisticate tactics, more worldly leaders, more ambitious goals, etc., and they had begun a pushback Inch by inch, mile by mile, river by river, Rome’s subjugated peoples were reclaiming their lands and freedom. Attila, the alert and wily leader of a lately rooted, originally nomadic people, was one such leader. The arrows in his quiver included imaginative diplomacy as well as brutal applications of the age-old scorched earth policy. Sometimes he was Rome’s ally. Sometimes he was Rome’s antagonist. He was a master of surprise, ambiguity and unpredictability, according to Kelly. His intelligence was always very very good. Need I say that Taliban leadership isn't so bad either?
Naturally, since I was already reading about Rome when the now infamous Rolling Stone article about the runaway general hit the internet, I couldn’t help thinking how poorly President Barak Obama had handled the necessary dismissal of his own insubordinate general in Afghanistan.
Obama, foolishly, underplayed the constitutionally-important subordination issue by accusing McChrystal of “divisiveness” vis-à-vis administration policy. On a pragmatic level, whatever the pretext, the dismissal served his purpose: he got rid of a general who wasn’t sympatico. This is every president’s prerogative. Yet, in the very next breath, and then repeatedly, Obama explicitly and very unwisely re-committed himself to a failed—or at least badly applied—policy. I can understand the politics here. Attempting to appear steadfast in order to neutralize enemies who persist in portraying him as a backboneless wimp, Obama embraced a foolishly short-sighted rigidity instead, welding himself to a policy he will have to modify in the not too distant future. What’s more, by avoiding the trap set by one bunch of Republicans, he fell afoul of another Republican critique: being too transparent to the enemy. He'd already set a date certain for initiating withdrawal. Now he's made a public proclamation of strategy, which could put him into a strait jacket domestically. Worse, as Attila could have admonished him, he's told the enemy exactly what he plans to do. McChrystal made this mistake, too. The Taliban have had months and months to prepare for the promised American campaign in Kandahar.
According to Kelly, the Romans were abysmally ignorant of their opponents. Americans, meanwhile, scratch their heads and wonder what on earth those Afghans want. As if Afghans were beasts and monsters with minds inaccessible to noble creatures like us!
Let me help a little. I think Priscus would approve. Using a combination of ordinary fellow feeling, gleanings from journalists’ interviews with Afghans and an awareness of Muslim texts about governance, I reach the conclusion that Afghans want three things. Security. Justice and the rule of law. Honest administration and policing. Any government that delivers these three desiderata will be supported. In fact, because of their reputation for honesty and keeping order, the Taliban were welcomed when they first marched into Kabul. As we know, they muffed that golden opportunity. Hamid Karzai, unfortunately, does not meet any of those three criteria, which is why Afghans do not rally to the government. They are truly between a rock and a hard place.
Oh, yes. Afghans want something else: they want a purely Afghan government. American troops can learn Pashtu or Dari. They can say “pretty please” as they demand to search a house. But the Americans and their allies are a foreign occupation. Romans were also renowned for their engineering skills and administrative abilities. They kept the peace. Coopted elites prospered. But, as Kelly shows, the Goths, the Vandals and the Huns along with many smaller tribes kicked them out as soon as they could.