The Chinese embassy in Kabul signalled on Sunday that it had been contact with the Taliban and would be staying put. Russia said it saw no need to evacuate its embassy for the time being. Turkey said its embassy would continue operations. -South China Morning Post, 16 / 8 / 2021: Afghanistan: US lowers flag at Kabul embassy as Taliban seize power
"You can't buy an Arab, but you can rent one." -Israeli proverb.
I think the Taliban are going to sell out.
The entire country of Afghanistan is one massive Lithium mine. Lithium is the wonder metal in Lithium batteries - Lithium is the reason electric cars do 200 miles rather than 50 (if that), and the reason phones are slim, lightweight devices rather than the "bricks" people of a certain age remember having in the late 90s. They're also the reason laptop computers are portable rather than transportable, and the reason the kids all have little speakers that fit in a coat pocket instead of massive ghetto blasters you carry on your shoulder.
Enough Gen-Xing now. Lithium is a vital part of the modern world, and the growth in demand for electric vehicles means that lithium will likely be the new oil... and Afghanistan is its' Saudi Arabia. The people that run Saudi Arabia hate everyone as well, they are also primitivist fascists, but while they might hate us, they just love our money......
So it is with Afghanistan. The Turks, Chinese and Russians are forming a loose alliance, a counterpoint to NATO which defends *their* "way of life". They need Afghanistan for the same reason we've needed Saudi Arabia - and I don't think they'll take kindly to dope pushers and terrorists setting up shop there. But they know how much the Taliban shit up the West, and having a well-muzzled attack dog on hand does tend to make negotiating with hostile others a lot less... difficult.
But anyway - that war is over, America lost already - the Taliban have no need to fight it all over again and risk everything they've gained.
Besides, the '80s-era Mujihadeen must be getting on in years now. Bin Laden was in his 20s when he went to Afghanistan, and would be in his sixties now. So are his confederates. When you're young, you're radical, you want to defeat superpowers, topple skyscrapers and defy the West from your mountain lair - but when you reach a certain age, you want to chill out, relax, have a bit of fun, repress your own people for a change! And a Lithium deal would allow them to do that. China and Russia don't need to guarantee security, but I know for a fact the Turks could sell them some lovely drones that would make short work of any interlopers - and the Chinese electronics industry will pay handsomely for all that lovely lith under their feet.
They'll do business, and before you know it, the country will be turned into a billion phones for Chinese teenage girls to watch their favourite K-Pop bands on, and a billion cars for their Dads to drive to work in.
It occurs to me that we live in a post-imperial age.
It's not just any specific empire that is obsolete, but imperialism generally. Technology has made military imperialism completely impossible to sustain.
The Americans and Russians both tried it and were slapped down by the same technological forces. Essentially, nuclear bombs and automatic wepaons have rendered imperialism obsolete.
The Mongol Empire was one of the largest empires even known, and the only one to ever encompass the territories in China, mid-Eurasia, the Middle East, AND Europe.
If you tried that now, you'd have about four sets of nuclear weapons headed your way along with about a billion people ready to shoot holes in you.
Nuclear bombs make it impossible to attack well-armed countries, and automatic weapons have made it impossible to conquer poorly armed countries. You can still take territory, but as the USA and the USSR found out, you can't keep it.
In the days of the Mongol Empire, before firearms, the basic infantry unit was a swordsman and the basic cavalry unit was a horseman. You generally had to be male (because they were all male-dominated cultures), you had to be young and fit, and you had to undergo years of training. This made it a simple matter of numbers, you spam the enemy with superior manpower, and you win because all the military units have to be so well trained, there are no partisans in the woods waiting to strike. Even historically difficult regions such as the Middle East and Afghanistan were easily subdued by the literal hordes commanded by the Mongols.
Today, anyone can be a soldier. You could easily raise a company-strength unit from my tower block alone - you just take someone between the age of 15 and 60, give them an automatic rifle, and you've got a soldier. This makes retaining territory impossible- the Mongols would have been constantly harassed by guerillas until they collapsed economically.
The Drone Age
I wonder what drones will do to upset this? Today it is possible for a single infantryman to deploy a weapon which can fly off and intelligently, autonomously attack a target consisting of up to a small platoon, definitely something at squad level - or perhaps a single lightly armoured vehicle. Air assets can also be attacked by a lone infantry soldier (and have been this vulnerable since the 1980s), but perhaps not intelligently - drones are good for fighting enemies on the ground, at least so far.
Drones are cheap, but unlike automatic rifles require access to some sort of high tech manufacturing - the main powers doing interesting things with drones today are Turkey, Israel, and Iran (and their clients). So we'll see a resurgence of mid-sized powers jumping up and making gains.
What do drones do against guerillas? Do they upset the current balance of power? I think we'll find out in the next few years; if someone takes over Afghanistan, Iraq calms down, and the Palestinians sue for peace, we'll know that drones have effetively decimated their guerilla armies. Drones could prove quiet devastating to morale; imagine the scene, you're a militant, you're dug in to some well defended area in Sadr City, Gaza, or Tora Bora, quite happily sitting there on a big pile of weapons and supplies, and then one day, BANG - everything explodes. You don't see it coming, and if you survive the attack you have no idea what's happening. Perhaps you think there's been an air attack - a missile has struck you, it's bad, but it appears to be over now.
Then your enemies, the bastards, stroll in with rifles and shoot all of the survivors. A hasty defence is mounted, but even if it's effective for a short time, all your foes have to do is trot over to their supply vehicles, grab more quadcopters, toss them into the air, and you get blown up all over again. Repeat until you are all dead.
So what might a post-drone world look like?
* The endless, miserable Israel / Palestine conflict would finally be over. Some sort of humiliating peace will be imposed, which will suck for the Palestinians, but at least the rest of us won't have to put up with their whining.
* Afghanistan will finally be opened up for development, probably by the Chinese. They're already making diplomatic inroads, and the people there are desperate for the Taliban to fuck off and die. So if someone turns up and kills them all with drones (and I'm talking about modern ones, not the stupid barbaric sledgehammers the Americans used to ruin so many weddings), there will be much gratitude among the populace towards any conquerers - especially if they're not Western or Russian.
* Iraq will finally stabilize. They might even get some sort of remotely functional democracy going. They may ally with the Iranians, or they may go Western, or even hang out with the Chinese or the Turks - it depends on who successfully markets their drones to them first.
* Geopolitically, the beneficiaries of this are likely to be states which do not have the same sort of moral compunction about using autonomous wepaons to kill. In the West there is a bit of a taboo about this, it comes from the experience of landmines, which persisted in the environment for decades after WWI and WWII, and the successful campaigns against cluster bombs, which can act as mine-laying devices. But drones are not landmines; drones open up areas to conquest while landmines are an "area denial" weapon, which act to close regions off.
So we'll see a rise of mid-size military powers and non-Western actors. Russia may win, but it may lose huge if it doesn't get its shit together fast. I can see the Ukreanians pushing them out successfully, leading to a Cuban Missile Crisis type situation when Ukreanian troops reach the Russian border.
Drones VS Nukes
Nuclear wepaons are interesting. They're the only kind of weapon whereby you can only win a war by NOT using them. Seen that way, there have been several nuclear wars, we just don't notice them because the bombs never actually get dropped, someone somewhere climbs down. The most recent one I'm aware of is North Korea VS the USA, which the North Koreans effectively won - they printed a lot of bluster, threatened everyone, *someone* set off that air raid warning system in Hawaii, and the next thing you knew, Trump and Kim are the best of friends!
Drones don't effect nuclear weapons, but the only way to defeat a drone swarm, other than impossibly superior numbers (perhaps a drone swarm of your own) is to pop a nuke a few miles up. The electromagnetic pulse would effectively disable their electronics, and as long as the detonation was high up enough, it wouldn't even have to kill anyone.
Imagine the Ukranian Army scores a whole load of good shit from the Turks or someone. They rush off into battle, chase those Russian assholes back accross the border, and... keep coming. The Russians panic, Dead Hand is hastily switched off, then on, then off again, and a Rockechiki somewhere goes "I know what to do!" presses the button, and seveal tens of miles above Western Russia, there's a flash of light and all the drones fall from the sky.
This would cause a lot of hot air and talk, but little could actually be done. After all, Russia would have nuked itsself, in self defence, and nobody would be directly killed by the bomb. But it would obviously lower the bar for the use of nukes, and, until cheap, workable electromagnetic pulse weapons are developed, after such an event there's a risk nuclear weapons would be seen as part of the armoury, rather than a tool for politicians.
EMP bombs VS Drones
However, we're more likely to see EMP and directed-energy weapons turned against drones. A microwave device that sits on a Humvee has already been developed, all it needs to fight drones is the requisite AI.
People in the know probably know there is a window of time in which mid-level powers can use drones effectively, before the real big spenders learn how to blast them out of the sky, probably with microwave weapons or possibly E-Bombs.
Scenario: Falklands War II
I wouldn't be at all surprised, for instance, if a second Falklands War took place. I can see a situation arising where Argentina falls to the far Right, as have so many other nations, and they decide to grab the islands with a surprise attack. Drones are cheap - the Azerbaijani military budget is on the same scale (3 billion or so) as Argentine spending; it is not at all economically inconceivable.
The military garrison would be overwhelmed by a surprise drone attack - Drones are too small to be targeted by radar and too numerous to shoot down. It would be a horribly one-sided battle; even if the British military garrison saw it coming there would be little they could do. Yes, we have all sorts of amazing American weapons, but these weapons are obsolete, useless against the new technology which allows a soldier to take out a squad, a squad to take out a platoon, a platoon to take out a company... and so on.
Without an answer to the drones, any reconquest attempt would be doomed to failure. The only conventional attack that might have any chance of success would be a full-on carpet bombing of the area, which would tend to kill the very people we're trying to save (ie, the islanders). Argentine troops would garrison themselves in a civilian area, making such an attack unlikely; if it did take place we'd win, but at the cost of turning Port Stanley into a pile of rubble. I don't think that would happen.
So we try to take the islands back with a ground invasion a la 1982. And the Argentinians would simply throw their quadcopters into the air and wait for our guys to die. And that would be that; the end of Anglo military superiority, a fitting footnote to the fall of Afghanistan.
I'm not a military expert; I'm just a dickhead on the internet, so these ramblings are probably not worth the server they're stored on. But it's a thought; the whole world might be about to turn upside-down - and this is just a lay analysis of military affairs. Who knows what else will emerge from the rise of AI? A return to planned economies? Endless dictatorship? The manipulation of public opinion has already been more or less perfected, which strongly implies this. Then again, people might wise up and reclaim democracy from our new AI autocrats - and that's what I hope for.
One thing is certain: Things are not going to stay the same.
