• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1433 0

essay “State Making and War Making As Organized Crime” in the same fashion.8 According to Tilley, “War makes states,” and “banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the same continuum.”9 He argues that organized crime–style protection rackets are, in many ways, akin to taxation by legitimate states. War, extortion, and plunder exist on a spectrum, separated by different levels of intensity and legitimacy. The main point of the essay is that as European war making became more expensive in the cost of ships, cannons, and fielding armies, so too did the project of taxation and administration become more developed and thus modern. As Tilley puts it,

In an idealized sequence, a great lord made war so effectively as to become dominant in a substantial territory, but that war making led to increased extraction of the means of war—men, arms, food, lodging, transportation, supplies, and/or the money to buy them—from the population within that territory. The building up of war-making capacity likewise increased the capacity to extract. The very activity of extraction, if successful, entailed the elimination, neutralization, or cooptation of the great lord’s local rivals; thus, it led to state making. As a by-product, it created organization in the form of tax-collection agencies, police forces, courts, exchequers, account keepers; thus it again led to state making.10

If conventional war making produced the modern state, then asymmetrical warfare, social breakdown, intercommunal strife, brigandry, and open-ended counterinsurgency in the age of climate chaos may well be the modern state’s undoing. As the means of administration and “extraction” collapse, “bands of armed men” fall away from the state and are released freelance into society to survive by their own devices. Taxation becomes theft as soldiers and police revert back to bribery, extortion, and banditry. Where the state is totally absent, gangs arise to govern slums like proto-city-states.

There may also be technological aspects to the breakdown of modern state power. As the Kenyan case illustrates, there is something particular about the proliferation of small arms: AK-47s, grenade launchers and machine guns. When these “democratic” means of violence are cheap enough, they undermine state power in a manner that is directly inverse to Tilley’s argument in which expensive naval ships and cannons demanded (and thus created) elaborate, centralized, modern bureaucracies and taxation regimes.11 If cannons and frigates made the modern nation state, the Kalashnikov and field radio might undo it.

III

ASIA

CHAPTER 9

Drugs, Drought, and Jihad: Environmental History of the Afghanistan War

A good year is determined by its spring.

—Afghan proverb

THE OLD FARMER opened walnuts and pomegranates in the courtyard of his mud-walled fortress home and explained his troubles. Wazir, the farmer, grows opium poppy and marijuana in a border district of southern Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan. The border, the Durand Line, runs along the ridges of a forbidding, snow-capped mountain range, which feeds the rivers that water Nangarhar’s scorching valleys.1

When I visited in early September 2006, the area was in the midst of a very bad drought. As the United Nations had discovered during a survey four years earlier, wells had been running dry for most of the last decade, as Afghanistan suffered “the most severe drought in living memory.”2 Scientists link this desiccation to climate change, particularly rising temperatures in the mountains and a slight decrease in precipitation.

The drought in Nangarhar finally broke in 2010 when the colossal Arabian Ocean Monsoon that flooded some 20 percent of Pakistan brushed along the Durand Line. In Pakistan, the United Nations estimated that almost 2,000 people had died, 14 million needed humanitarian aid, 2.4 million hectares of crops were lost, 1.9 million homes were destroyed or damaged, and over 7 million people were homeless. Perhaps worse, the floods destroyed 50 years of infrastructure.