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Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Or:
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
Great post. It’s an extreme loss of state capacity for internal violence. Look at Mao’s China, successful eradication of a centuries-long opioid epidemic (in which as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts) in fifteen years. And it wasn’t because he killed everyone; he killed the more obvious dealers, sure, but you actually don’t need to kill that many people to trigger prosocial change. If the US army rolls into the South Side of Chicago, or Baltimore, or St Louis, and starts blasting, you could quite possibly limit the death toll to three or low four figures in each city (ie barely above the actual homicide rate) and still seriously dissuade violent crime. And as you note, the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau and really the entire history of British India show that you don’t actually need that many people or that much violence to accomplish this. 15,000 British ruled over 400,000,000 Indians. In 2003, 130,000 NATO forces ruled over 20,000,000 Afghans, a vastly more favorable ratio. And yet they lost, because they were too afraid to do the needful.
We were discussing South Africa earlier in the thread, and there are parallels to that situation (even though I disagree with apartheid and think the Boers are largely responsible for their presently poor condition). Even with the whole world against them, there is no way that 5 million Dutch and English in a country with a huge resource bounty and extensive arable land armed with literal nuclear weapons and modern technology, and bordered by countries that (unlike Israel’s foes) had no capable armed forces and definitely did not want a war with them, could not have held out indefinitely - even at a relatively high standard of living. But there was no will for it. The situation in American cities, as I noted in my post on Seattle a couple of months ago, is the same. It’s not a resource question, a few armed police could clear out the homeless permanently in a few hours. It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
The Angolans weren’t capable of mounting an invasion of South Africa proper and had no intention of doing so, plus by the mid-80s when the Mig-29 was entering service as an export product the Cold War was winding down. More generally, I don’t think it’s possible to believe in HBD and think any of the Southern African countries could present a serious military threat to South Africa, especially when most of SA’s neighbors relied utterly on South Africa for economic reasons and had no interest in participating. Angola’s annoyance with South Africa extended to South Africa’s involvement in Namibia and the Angolan Civil War (where it was in practice on the American side). The US only passed anti-apartheid legislation in 1986 and frankly I suspect that had the Soviet Union not collapsed the CIA would have found other ways to ensure the Angolan communists continued to be contained. In addition, both the Soviet Union and China traded extensively with South Africa behind the scenes, including in arms, as has only more recently become fully clear. The decline of American power since 2001 and the growth of China, not to mention new opportunities for trading relationships with the Arabs and others who wouldn’t care about apartheid would have further made the system more tenable for longer. The economy had stabilized even under American sanctions by 1989 as, like Russia today, the South Africans figured out how to obtain what they wanted anyway.
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This is not the first time I got the impression that the Chinese Communists have had great success even in the West in greatly exaggerating the long-term consequences of the Opium Wars waged by Western imperialist devils. It makes sense on their part, as it's an integral part of their narrative on the so-called "century of humiliation". As far as I know, though, opium addiction was never anywhere near as widespread in China as the Communists later claimed. Opium dens obviously existed in urban areas, but the great majority of guests weren't addicts; in fact, addicts weren't tolerated there, as nobody was permitted to occupy tables for long. It's true that lots of peasants consumed opium as a painkiller, but considering their usual workload, this wasn't surprising. The claim that as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of urban young men were heavy addicts is, to me, highly suspect.
It's worth adding that, I guess, living in place that is basically a fortress surrounded by barbed wire, in a state of constant vigilance and paranoia, might seem entirely tolerable to some aging Boomer who's living in fear and thinking only in terms of security and certainty anyway, as long as the standard of living is sort of good, but for their children it's a vastly different story, especially if they're educated. Which is what you alluded to in an earlier comment of yours earlier in the thread indeed.
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I don't think it explains it. 5 centuries ago Babur the conqueror captured Delhi using Afganistan as his base. India is probably easier to conquer.
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Your core point is correct, but it's worth noting that there are principle-agent problems within this. Plenty of people do have the will to simply remove vagrants, but the United States is home to people that will take it all the way to the Supreme Court insisting that bums have a right to camp in your parks if you don't just give them housing. The threat of litigation and the fact that there are lunatic judges that will rule in favor of the bums means that it takes a lot of will to proceed with something as simple as telling bums not to camp in your park. Some of the hoarders don't want to live in filth, but there is a powerful federal government forcing them to at gunpoint.
No sure, I’m not saying everyone’s aligned with this at all. But broadly the American public is pretty squeamish about a lot of things. Support for extreme authoritarian measures is probably pretty low across the board, although perhaps I could be positively surprised.
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