If neocolonialism's day is done, the nation state itself -- that other great 19th century European political export -- also appears to be living on borrowed time in many parts of the periphery. Unfortunately for the Cheneyites and the U.S. Army, this zone now includes both Iraq and Afghanistan. If they're not very careful, it could easily swallow the rest of the most important oil-bearing region on the planet.
The nation-state construct has already begun the process of practical devolution, as an ancillary effect of globalization. This doesn't necessarily condemn the concept of globalization (it has its "good" and "bad" features, which of course largely depends on whether or not you're reaping the benefits of comparative advantage), it's just a point of fact that it has enabled multinational corporations to transcend boundaries, creating something of a class of transnational (or perhaps more correctly, stateless in a practical sense) merchant princes.
The requisite nationalist totems and hagiographies are retained to keep the peons in line, but as far as the regulation of capital flow and economic policy is concerned, it's a different story. Vertical integration and explicit corporate underwriting of virtually the entire political process, from funding political campaigns to writing law, has effectively placed even nominal control of policy at some distance from the citizens -- who, after all, are supposed to be the repository of power in a democracy, no?
And since well before the Treaty of Westphalia, there have always been restive breakaway provinces. The advent of technology and communications has necessitated a new term for them, microstates. (Microstates used to refer to miniscule toy countries such as Liechtenstein and Andorra, but is more and more used to describe rebellious enclaves like Transdniester and South Ossetia.)
This trend has been accelerated over the past decade by two disconnected, yet associated, events/paradigms -- the 9/11 attacks and subsequent responses, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent Russian entrenchment in Chechnya. What the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks inadvertently demonstrated, to a limited degree, was that a relatively small cadre of driven individuals could affect much larger forces than themselves with sheer leverage. Since they are not politically but rather ideologically motivated, the specific al Qaeda movement has to seek a host state in which to hide, survive, and recruit. They are not equipped to establish the basics of even a subsistence economic and social structure; all they can do is find a host organism to attempt to mutate by force and connivance, as they did in Afghanistan.
Where Chechnya comes in is that many of these potential microstates are on the frontiers of Russia, or are parts of former Soviet republics. (Transdniester, for example, is a province of Moldova, Europe's poorest country.) Emboldened in part by the stubborn Chechen resistance, inflamed by the Russians' brutal campaigns there, and bound by ethnicity or religion, substates like Abkhazia and South Ossetia have begun to organize more political modes of resistance.
All "power to the people" homilies aside, this could very easily turn into a disastrous paradigm for the established nation-states to deal with. It would not be terribly unlike herding cats, blindfolded (the herder, not the cats). As the smart guys at Coming Anarchy point out, without the political and economic know-how to complement the quasi-statist imperative, you are really looking at a small entity without the proper resources and weight to thrive. That is a recipe for a failed state, and indeed, Russia may have its own reasons for being rather sanguine about such a trend in its sphere.
But what Russia may perceive as pliant proxy neighbors is not so much a return to the buffer-state paradigm of the Warsaw Pact, but rather a ring of fractious, failed enclaves, ripe for exploitation by nefarious parasitic cell-oriented terrorist groups, bankrolled by organized crime staples such as drug smuggling and human trafficking. The Russians were already hopelessly inept at securing their missiles and nuclear materials from their Central Asian states upon disingtegration of the Soviet Union, so there's not much reason to trust that they will be proactive in evaluating the "microstate" problem from anything other than their historical defensive posture.
Where this ties in with the specific region Billmon refers to, our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that the future in both countries militates strongly in that direction. Iraq is headed toward full-on civil war, and ultimately partition, with Iran influencing the Shi'a south (which at least prevents a full slide into microstate chaos in the short term), and a resurgent al Qaeda vying with indigenous Sunni tribes for control of the western desert provinces, from which they will have a much more centralized location from which to organize and plot. Perhaps Turkish and/or Iranian Kurds become emboldened by the Iraqi Kurdish state and attempt to breakaway with states of their own.
Afghanistan and even Pakistan fare little better in this regard. Afghanistan is splintering away, back into regional and ethnic warlordism. Suicide bombings are occurring with alarming regularity; this may be a precursor of yet another civil war to come. Several provinces of Pakistan (the notorious "tribal regions") are chronically rebellious, and Musharraf has a scarily tenuous hold on power there to begin with. Considering that Pakistan is a nuclear power with a virulently anti-American populace and an army and intel service at least tacitly sympathetic to the Taliban, it is an infinitely more delicate and dangerous situation that Iraq or Iran.
A talking point that has gained renewed currency in the run-up to the midterm elections is the disposition of Osama bin Laden. Bush has already botched his attempt to finesse the question, babbling about Pakistani sovereignty last week and trying to shift gears into tough-guy mode with Leslie Blitzer today, much to Musharraf's chagrin.
Let's not put too fine a point on it -- capturing bin Laden would most likely require at least a small-scale tactical incursion into a heavily defensed tribal region. It would probably require bombing sorties to soften up resistance, and would certainly incur casualties on the ground. Even if successful, it probably wouldn't matter a lick to Pakistani citizens whether we executed such a mission or if Musharraf did it himself. It is not unrealistic at all to speculate that the civilian response in a country of 140 million could be catastrophic. The main point is that while capturing bin Laden is certainly important, it may also cause more problems than it would solve, and there's no indication that this administration has thought those ramifications through.
Risk management has clearly never been this administration's strong suit, and Bush's tone-deaf provocations do nothing to help the situation. They were on the right track in late 2001/early 2002, when the idea was to "drain the swamp" of Afghanistan and Pakistan's frontier provinces, where these gangsters (and that's really all they are; there's no point in upgrading them with more exotic appellations) hide and thrive. But now the swamp is refilling, and the mosquitoes are back, and we're tied down chasing shadows through Baghdad while the rest of Iraq spins out of control.
So our actions and reactions have done much to fuel the necessary conditions for accelerating the microstate scenario which, if we're not careful (and maybe even if we are) could turn into multiple Talibans and al Qaedas festering in multiple failed states. And of course, much of this "end of the nation-state/rise of the microstate" theory is speculative in nature, but certainly not unreasonably so, and we would do well to start paying attention to the situation sooner rather than later. Because of the momentum involved, these things take time to happen, but they also take time to undo.
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