Angry Planet - It’s Time to Retire the Term ‘Proxy War’

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

One of the persistent themes of Angry Planet has been that smaller countries in the spheres of influence of great powers have far greater control over their destinies than it would appear. If the recent fighting in the Middle East has taught us anything, it’s that local partners have plans of their own and it’s impossible for a patron to have complete control over what happens on the ground.On this episode of Angry Planet, Barbara Elias of Bowdoin College comes on to make the case for retiring the term ‘proxy war.’ It’s a wide ranging conversation that covers Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Vietnam. Tune in for a worthwhile discussion of geopolitical semantics and stick around for a wild story of million dollar goats in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Failed Goat Farm Is the Perfect American DisasterLocal Partners Are Not Proxies: The Case for Rethinking Proxy WarWhy Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency WarsSubscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work? Yeah, so my name is Barbara Elias. I am the Sarah and James Bowdoin Associate Professor of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College. I have also spent a good deal of time. at the National Security Archive, which is a nonprofit associated with GW University, where I ran their declassification program on U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. And I've been a professor now for 10 years. I specialize in proxy wars, I guess, although that's a term I don't like, as we'll talk about probably. but I focus on security studies, on alliances, and especially on asymmetric alliances, especially when you have one very wealthy patron and a much more resource-defficient local partner.

What draws someone to work on the mass declassification of Afghanistan reports? How do you get drawn into that work? I think that it takes a good deal of obsession with how bureaucracy shapes foreign policy. I have an insatiable curiosity about how institutional process affects policy outcomes, often in unexpected ways, I think, when you don't see how everything that goes into the soup, it doesn't seem to make any sense. but then it really does take a close view at what are different institutional pressures that people are responding to within organizations that creates really suboptimal policy outcomes. What's the name of the John Sopko office? For some reason, it's escaping me now that puts out the quarterly reports about. Yeah, cigar.

It's been fascinating me over the past however long they've been doing it. I've been reading those reports. They're very long. They're very detailed. and you get this story of the conflict that I don't think a lot of people would expect, I guess. It's a very detailed, bureaucratic version of events, but there's a lot of truth there, and there's a lot of high-level information and a lot of strange anecdotes. And I would say that for anyone who, for me, you know more than I do,

but for anyone who didn't think Afghanistan was going to go the way that it did, they weren't reading the reports. 100%. Yeah. And I guess that's also what's really fascinated about the declassified record is that you see you see this coming. I mean, people who are on the ground, the Americans who are on the ground who are doing a lot of this work and who are trying to prevent the tragedy

that we all witnessed, they see it coming miles and miles away. It's this very slow car crash that they have to participate in and try their best. But you really do become. sympathetic to a lot of people who worked very hard, but it was just given impossible tasks on top of impossible tasks with extra work on top. So it is, I mean, I think that different decisions could have been made, but at the same time, you see once the ball is rolling in Afghanistan after 2006 or seven, it's already, unfortunately, written. Yeah, it's the, a slow-leaving

car crash is a good way to put it. and one that everyone is on the sidelines wishing they could stop, but there's just nothing they can do because the machine just keeps rolling. Exactly. So you said a moment ago that you don't like the term proxy war, even though you are a scholar of it, which is kind of the main thrust of what you're here to talk about today. Local partners are not proxies. The case for rethinking proxy war is your piece in the irregular warfare initiative that caught my producer. I, and then he sent it to me. And it is very much

kind of of a theme that we get to in the show here quite a bit. Can you walk us through the piece and kind of what your argument is? Yeah, so my argument, which I wrote this piece very reluctantly, because I think academics reasonably so have a bad

reputation for semantics, for obsessing over terminology and, you know, are just kind of insulated in there little towers and they just chat amongst each other about, you know, what does this variable mean or what does this word mean exactly? And so I did not want to be one of those academics. But at the same time, the term I felt, you know, in terms of thinking through proxy wars as a term,

I think it was doing harm to the debates that were having. And I did think was worthwhile for us as a community of scholars as well as for practitioners as well as for journalists to think through what exactly are we saying when we're talking about proxy wars. And the thrust of the argument is simply that I think that the term that when you describe local partners that wealthy states like the United States support for shared security reasons, when we refer to them as proxies, I think we're overestimating the influence of the foreign patron like the United States that are working with local partners, they're working with local partners. They're not working, like the local partners are not working for the United States. They're working with the United States. And I think that

when you bake into the actual terminology, an aspirational relationship, as opposed to a descriptive relationship, then you're having, you're having some problems. You're limiting the kinds of conversations that you're having and you're really setting expectations that are unlikely to be met. there's continual surprise that local partners have their own autonomy, have their own set of interests independent of the ones that wealthy patrons put upon them. And they will follow those interests. They have a lot of state and they're balancing a lot of pressures. And so I think that the term proxy is misleading. And I think it was creating expectations that were unreasonable or what we see on the ground.

I also dislike semantic conversations and arguments. I think it often, often it's used as a way to avoid having the conversation you want to actually be having. You can argue over terminology instead of the thing, right? But I also have to acknowledge that language shapes, and the words we choose shape the way we think of things. And when I hear the word proxy, I imagine that, that. something is acting almost as an appendage of whatever they're a proxy of, right?

So the proxy partners for America are acting completely in America's interests and are just a piece of the American Empire but slightly removed, right? And that is not the actual reality on the ground in many of these places, right? Which is your argument. Right. And it is also very interesting that when you read the, classified documentation that comes from bargaining with local partners. The United States diplomats never use the term proxy face to face.

So it should tell you something that the actual diplomats who are in the actual, or negotiating the proxy relationship, don't call it a proxy relationship to those partners because it's an insulting term to them. and it's not a useful term in those interactions for Americans to use. So I think that that alone should say something about how neutral of a term this is or it isn't. Where does it come from? That's a good question. I mean, I think it comes from, it's an antiquated term.

I think that comes from the colonial era of thinking about how you had a core and a periphery, and you had, like you said, appendages to an empire. And this was a way of thinking things through. I think the Cold War transitioned the term in some sense from the colonial era to the post-colonial era of thinking about Soviet proxies or American proxies, which were not colonial appendages, but also in terms of the superpower and empire-averse kind of client relationships that continued. And then I think it continues today, but I think largely because it's unexamined. And for various reasons, I think we've come far from that model. And so I think our terminology should also be updated for that.

So like so many other things, it's a bit of a colonial Cold War hangover. Yeah, it's true. How much of that is relevant, you know, and I teach undergraduates oftentimes. And, you know, they always want to get to the now and skip the colonial legacies and the Cold War legacies, but you can't get to now without there. So, you know, we try to go through it, but also do it justice. So what does proxy mean exactly and does it mean different things when different people are saying it? So, like, when a journalist says it, does it mean the same things when a politician says it? Well, I think like many concepts in security and war and the types of issues that you examine in the podcast, I think it's not clearly defined, but maybe this term even more so, which adds to the confusion. I think when journalists use the term proxy tends to mean a non-state actor or an agent of a more powerful actor, typically a state, like Hezbollah being a proxy for Iran.

politicians tend to call their own proxies partners, right, out of respect, and their enemy proxies, they call them proxies, because it's a slightly insulting term, the appendage term. So I do think it's used in different ways. Sometimes it's referred to states, sometimes it's referred to non-states, but always with that idea of it being kind of a client type of relationship, you work for me. But again, I think that's aspirational as opposed to descriptive. So what then are the good descriptive terms? Is it local partner?

Is that the one that we should be, that it's probably a better term to use? Yeah, I think so. You know, there's no, it's maybe not as catchy as the term proxy. Can have lots of local partners. But I also think that a broader term would be, more reflective of the diverse kinds of hierarchies and partnerships that you actually do develop between kind of foreign states that are willing to sponsor smaller actors in order to get local influence. What exactly those arrangements are vary. And so I think it should also,

our terminology should have that variation be built into it. So another piece of this, the piece that's really caught my eye in the past like a couple months, is this constant misunderstanding in discussions that I've had with friends and colleagues and also just in the media writ large of what it means when a country like America or Iran say have local partners. You say proxy.

And I hear sentences like Iran has lost control of its proxies or America has lost control of its proxies. and simply the fact that we're, because we're using the word proxy, we're kind of catching things in these terms that, like you said, where it's aspirational. These countries do not have complete control over their local partners, obviously, and local partners have interests that are diverging from their partners, their imperial partners. So can we kind of talk about why this term kind of muddles our ability to understand what they're, these relationships actually are. Yeah, and I think to our detriment. And I, you know, the other factor that's built into this, like, kind of constant surprise,

this like goldfish response to like, huh, they have interests their own and means of getting it. You know, I think, because in a lot of ways, we often conflate resources and power. And, of course, the two are related, but not perfectly so. Like money is often unnecessary but insufficient source for getting influence, right? You can't always buy influence. It also fits our worldview, especially for Americans, to think of great powers as the primary source of politics because we're unaware and even sometimes uninterested in local power dynamics. That also very much shapes conflict dynamics and outcomes, right?

But I think that it's this lack of understanding that you can influence can come from a variety of sources. Like, for example, you know, local partners in Afghanistan had tremendous influence over the American war because of American political dependencies on their success. It had nothing to do with money. Like the United States was pouring money into Afghanistan that did not buy influence because at the end of the day, the Afghans knew. the U.S. partner Afghans knew that the United States was also very much beholden to their decisions. So they had influence in a sense that from a different source that I think is often underappreciated as opposed to resources, which we often think, often use as a shorthand for influence, but it does not match exactly.

How do the clients or the local partners view these relationships? do they use? I know that's going to be varied, as varied as there are local partners, but can you walk me through some of the ones you know? Yeah. Well, I think that what's interesting is that there is a lot of quiet conversations that happen among local partners that aren't publicized, that aren't declassified. You know, a lot of the primary source documents that I would love to get my hands on. It's not written down or not accessible to me or to anybody outside of those circles. And I think part of that is because local partners have a lot of politics to deal with. They have, they have, you know, regular, like civilian populations, they have to deal with

communities that they live in. They also have, you know, competing groups and elites around them that they have to placate and deal with the threats come laterally from other sources of influence within their states, they also have to deal with one or maybe more foreign patrons that demands certain behaviors in exchange for influence. So I think there are a lot of conversations that happen. And I think there is also a lot of evasion that happens. I think there's a lot of things that say multiple stories to different audiences. is in order to survive another day. You know, I think there are very astute politicians that can survive in that kind of political

environment. And so, you know, I think there's probably a good deal of frustration on their part in trying to cope with, you know, American or Iranian viewpoint, you know, if they're trying to manage it, but also, too, you know, trying to kind of give their form. aren't patrons enough of what they need to get them off their backs, but to constantly be trying to maintain their own autonomy as much as possible and to try to also maximize how much they can get out of their patrons, right? They want to maximize their income and they want to minimize the influence, whereas if the patron is seeking the opposite, right, they want to maximize

influence and minimize resources. So it's somewhere in there is a complex bargaining dynamic. You would imagine someplace like Taiwan probably has one of the more interesting and conflicted relationships with the great powers around it, right? Yeah, absolutely. Trying to balance lots of things very carefully in a very dangerous set of circumstances. And then trying to also realize that there are no guarantees and that they will also have to manage. and that they will also have to, you know, manage allies as much as managing enemies. What about the ways that countries that aren't America view these relationships? I'm talking here like Russia, China, Iran is the one that's been in the news lately.

How do they think about local partners and how is it different from how America thinks? about them. Yeah, it's a very interesting question because I think in this way, in many ways, I think Americans have a different viewpoint, but they don't always appreciate we, I'm also American, don't always appreciate how different our viewpoint is from the way other states view these things. I saw this most up close and personal probably with documenting Pakistan's approach to its proxies, including the, if we're going to use that term, including the Taliban.

And this, it was very interesting because, you know, the United States tends to have a viewpoint about having kind of a commitment to allies, to an ally, and to supporting that ally. Whereas I think states that are, don't quite have that type of power projection in terms of global politics, they take a more scattershot approach, you know, supporting lots of different groups. Let's see who wins. Let's see who loses. Let's see who has influence today. Let them compete with each other. It's much more of like betting on a lot of forces than really investing in one and seeing how that, you know, that goes. And that always, I think, was very striking to me as a different approach. I think Iran has this kind of approach in part, and certainly Pakistan does,

where it's like just the willingness to support lots of different groups, some that even compete with each other. And that's just a way of hedging their bets and also playing the groups off of each other and also seeing, you know, survival of the fittest, seeing who can survive out there, which group is actually going to succeed in which way. Is the idea then in those situations to keep, kind of keep the groups that are at your periphery fighting amongst themselves instead of maybe turning around and looking at Pakistan or Tehran? Yes. I mean, that's definitely one of the potential benefits of it. You have a variety of different groups you can call on coalitions. You can attempt to coerce or, create, although again, you may or may not have enough influence to do that with these various

groups. But I think that's definitely part of it is also in terms of creating a bit more of chaos. And then in that kind of confusion, you're able to assert yourself a bit better. And we do see that with Iran. And what are the methods that you said you've studied Pakistan the most, right? what are the methods they use to achieve those goals? Are they just giving money? Are they giving weapons? How does it work? Yeah.

Well, they can negotiate both or even training is a frequent resource that they'll offer. Or they can also offer foreign expertise, you know, send different types of individuals that they have connections to that can provide a special special, specialization and this kind of bomb making, that kind of aspect of something that might create a new capability for the group that's on the ground. But I think it's largely also just trying to get a foot in a lot of doors because the future is uncertain. So in terms of, you know, Pakistan, for example, in its support of the Taliban in the early to mid-90s, you know, was supporting lots of different groups, seven different groups.

And part of that was also just to be able to influence all of it, like all the entire civil war that was taking place. And then to be able to kind of control, instead of just backing one side or even two sides of backing the entire same, in part in order to have greater influence with whatever outcome took place. And that ended up being the Taliban in 1996. but Pakistan have given a lot of resources to other proxy entities in that area that ended up surrendering to the country. If you're a local partner stuck in one of these situations and you find out that they're giving money to you and the other guy, isn't that grading? Isn't that, are there ever consequences to that? I'm sure. I mean, I could absolutely imagine that that would be grading.

It could also make it seem like they are an inevitable component of the conflict, almost like another aspect of the environment that you fight in, right? And you can also use that to bargain for more out of them potentially. You can say, well, you gave this guy that, so give that to me. We have some of those dynamics that occurred. Or you can also then work together maybe to conspire against the patron. That's another aspect. I mean, there's a good deal of Afghan hostility towards Pakistan's intrusion in Afghan politics throughout the years. That's right. I suppose it doesn't pay to get mad at the weather.

So I read your piece last year, and then it has been kind of constantly on my mind over the past few months, especially as we've been watching what's been going on in the Middle East, especially around the Houthis, and Lebanon, just kind of the entire region. I mean, the entire region is always conflicted, obviously, but we've been hearing a lot about Iranian proxies lately and America's proxies and that this is the whole area is engaged in a proxy war. And I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on how we are, how journalists are framing this right now and how we can do better.

Yeah. Well, I think that, I think that the way that I'm hearing journalists talk about the various competitions between the United States and Israel on one hand and then Iran, on the other hand, it does often reference the Iranian proxy groups. I think, you know, on the one hand, it's better than just saying this is Iran, period, and not referencing that it's a crowded battlefield with lots of different actors. On the other hand, I think that it's a way kind of a shorthand for people to talk about what's happening on the battlefield to signal a complexity without actually understanding that complexity. So while it's good to have that signal,

I think that it's probably stopping kind of the in-depth conversations that we should be having about the variety of groups that are allied with Iran that are acting in the region with competition between those groups and overlap among those groups and a competition for influence over those groups and a variety of different factors that aren't being accounted for because they keep being tied as an Iranian appendage, which is not necessarily the case. They're a partner, but they're not always acting in Tehran's best interest. And they also, you know, we don't, We don't know how much influence Tehran has at any given moment with any given set of circumstances over a variety of these different groups. Yeah, the American security state would kind of have us believe that Iran pushes a button and someone on the coast of the Red Sea fires a missile.

And that's just not quite how things work. There's a lot of signal transmission between the two sure, but people make the same. own choices. Governments make their own choices and have their own, have their own motivations. Yes. And it will vary over time. And that's not to say that Tehran has no influence over these groups. It certainly does. But that it would be context specific and depending on the set of circumstances and that, you know, it's a level of detail into the conflicts that I don't think a lot of people are willing to invest. And so they're tied to this. But in this way, when you're your comment about the Cold War, it does remind me a bit about how, you know,

how much Americans tended to overestimate how much the North Vietnamese was a proxy of the Soviet Union. Certainly supported by the Soviets and the Soviets had an influence over Hanoi's decisions, but it was a fiercely independent movement that very much wanted to play both China and the Soviet Union as patrons and very much would not sacrifice its ability to make strategic decisions as it saw best. Now, I'm not saying that Iranian partners are equally as autonomous as that, but I'm just saying it's very easy to kind of play into the state is in charge and non-state, not in charge, when that is often and maybe increasingly so flipped.

This kind of goes to my next question, which has been, as I said at the top, one of the big themes of this show, one of the big things we wanted to talk about is that countries other than Russia, China and the U.S. have complex motivations that are not always tied to what global superpowers want. Why do you think it's so hard for some of us to think of the world outside of the motivation of these giant global powers? Yeah. Well, it's a great theme. I'm glad you're on it. I'm listening to. I think it's hard to think, I think it's hard to think that way because we draw our opinions from what we know, not from what we don't know. And there's a desire to simplify a very complex world based on categories and according to the frames that we have.

It's harder to seek out information that we don't have. You can't Google words, phrases, influences you don't know. right, you Google, you use words and phrases that you have, again, back to the idea of language being important. And so we tend to overly to put too much weight on the importance of superpowers as a familiar frame to Americans. And also to make those superpowers also seem more unitary than they are. We say China does this or on does this. But they are also diverse, complex organizations and societies that pull in dynamic directions as well. And even if you have an authoritarian regime like we see in Iran,

they still have a lot of complicated domestic issues to balance. And so that's also going to play into their foreign policy decision making. Even within the actor you're talking about, it's not going to be as unitary as we assume. But then on top of that, I think that the willingness to really engage in understanding how important local politics are away from superpowers is critically important and something that tends to not fit when we're looking for a 20-second summary on what's happening in international politics. I also think that when you are in a country like America or China or Russia and when you're a citizen of that country, your entire culture is so overwhelming to you that it is really hard for you to see outside of it

and see outside of its motivations, right? And I think that even if you are a critique of the country's government, you can kind of get swept up in the narrative that it has as much power as it does. Like, they would love you to think that Iran would love it for everyone to think that they push a button and things happen with their proxies, right? So I think that there's that that kind of thing as part of it too. You kind of get dom. You're blinded by your own country and your own country's media, right? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, and to just quickly, you know, highlight that point exactly with Vietnam was amazing to have, because enough time has passed to hear that the, you know, how much the, you know, Vietnamese really saw Americans as an extension of the French. And to the Americans, the French lost because there were these corrupt colonial empire that was run and forget it. And of course, you know, the American conception of itself and Americans who are staffing these diplomatic and military positions in Vietnam absolutely saw that there were nothing like the French. You know, but that is not at all how it appeared on the ground. And that blindness to that perception very much cost the Americans in that war, not being able to see that and then to kind of act upon that instead of just adopting a lot of the French methods, not necessarily directly, but then over time or indirectly here. You would imagine from the Vietnamese perspective, it's the accents and language change, right? but, you know, they fall into the same tactics.

They maybe have more firepower, but it's the same thing. Right. It very much seemed the same. He looked the same largely to them in terms of both the military material that we're using and also predominantly white force. So, you know, what have you. So we talked about this a little bit with Afghanistan, but I was wondering if we can compare and contrast how America works with local partners

versus how other countries work with local partners. I know we talked about Iran and Pakistan kind of giving a bunch of money to a bunch of different groups. Does America do that too, or do we pick winners and losers? You know, what are we, how does it differ? Yeah, well, so the United States, because the U.S. is a little bit more limited in what it can do in terms of local forces. For one, it is more beholden to oversight,

like human rights abusers, for example, or groups that would violate certain norms locally. Oftentimes, you know, that's blocked by various congressional measures or by publicity or, you know, the U.S. is limited in what it can support, what kinds of groups' reputations and who it can support in a way that like, you know, the Russians and Iranians don't care. It's my, I mean, in fact, you know, like the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, the Shia, various Shia groups did some absolutely horrible things to the Sunni population in Iraq. And that kind of thing, that's not a group that the United States can back, even if it's in some sense politically or militarily effective. its means are not worth the or do not justify the ends in terms of what

what kinds of groups the United States can support. So it's a bit more limited in terms of those kinds of groups. Also, it's, you know, the United States is also known as, you know, relying on local partners, but also, you know, maybe trying to insist that they reform a bit too much here or there. And then also funding can be variable, you know, depends on the administrations. You know, we're watching this right now with Ukraine, for example, like it depends on what the administration and what Congress are willing to do to back them. So that kind of those longer-term commitments that, you know, hate to save, but authoritarian regimes

are known for upholding that, you know, democratic processes sometimes can call, you know, can, you know, local partners can question if the United States is going to continue to support it, or if the is just for now and what they can do to manipulate the situation to get as much as possible in the short term because who knows about the long term. I mean, that's kind of what happened in Afghanistan, right? Afghanistan is a perfect case study for what you're talking about where we pump a bunch of money into the country. We attempt all of these reforms.

A lot of the reforms don't go well. and there's a lot of very powerful people in Afghanistan just kind of waiting, just kind of taking the money, doing kind of what they want with it, and then just waiting for us to leave, which we inevitably did, right? Right. It's always interesting to me when you hear, and this is again where Sigar, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, you know, but they were partly founded in order to follow the money.

Like, where was U.S. money going? It's an accountability. measure and they did great work. But it's also this narrative that we hear oftentimes like all this money was lost. We lost all this money in Afghanistan and it's like money wasn't lost. The money is almost like I think people it's an enormous amount of paper that was written about

where the money went. More of it is documented than you would think audience. It's shocking. I encourage anyone to pick up just any given quarterly report from Cigar and just go through it. I think one of my favorite stories, this one was from, must have been five or six years ago now. They wanted to encourage goat farming in an area. They got these goats.

They decided to import fancy goats from Italy that could grow a specific kind of wool that they would be able to make exquisite clothing out of. Well, they're not indigenous to the region. They're very expensive to fly over, and they can't eat the stuff that's in Afghanistan. When, in fact, they've already got goats in Afghanistan.

The farming was going great. The farmers knew how to take care of the goats. They fly in these fancy goats that are worth thousands of dollars, and they all die because they can't be taken care of. So they built these goat pens, flew over these goats, and it's just kind of money gone. And there's a lot of stories like this. Um, there's, the, the, the goat one is particularly interesting because it was part of a, it was like a feel good you and initiative story. So there's a lot of archival video on YouTube sites about like showing off the goats and talking about how this is going to be a great thing. Um, it didn't work out. Soybeans and opium is another classic, uh, Afghan story. We kind of, it's interesting. We classify these things as kind of waste fraud and abuse adjacent, but it's really, it's more of just a failure.

almost. There was a lot of earnest people trying their best and flushing money down the toilet on pipe dream projects. Yeah, and there was probably strong institutional support for that program, but probably other programs that were for various reasons, you know, less supported by the bureaucracy, even if in retrospect it would have made a lot more sense, for example, like talk to the goat farmers that are already. there. What do they need? What would benefit that? You know, start their kind of thing. But maybe for some reason, that's not going to get the funding through whatever agency needs to get it because maybe it's also tied to something that the United States finds impalatable. Like, oh, perhaps it's run through a school and a school is called a madrasa. And so then that wasn't then supported by, you know, the American institutions. Like there's all kinds of these things where, you know, like you said, it's waste, it's wasteful and, and, you know, corruption at a certain level.

But it's also then you, you see there's these two incompatible systems at play kind of just hitting each other. And I am thinking about goats in my head now that you're like hitting each other. Butting. But I think the, the great incompatible systems, Afghanistan story is the way the way the, the U.S. was trying to pay local militants, like people that were guarding, like, various places, that were on payroll, but didn't have bank accounts. So they would have to, like, disperse cash. But sometimes the people would be very far away in these far-flung provinces.

And so there were, there was, like, a whole system where guys were showing up in, like, collecting people's paychecks and then taking 20% for themselves. and then ferrying the cash up. It's just, you know, it's like two completely different ways of doing business that, you know, just don't quite mesh together. We're trying to make Afghanistan into America a little bit, and it did not work out very well. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, Vietnam, too, this idea that, I mean, inflation was so, so high in Vietnam at one point

because of the American intervention that the U.S. started to pay the South Vietnamese bureaucrats with rice instead of money because at that point in South Vietnamese currency was so astronomically off the charts. But the United States didn't want to pay with Vietnamese rice because then that was just flooding the market and feeding inflation more. So then it's importing rice. And if you're importing rice in Vietnam, you know, like these, do you hear it? Like imported goats. Right.

Like at some point you're like, okay, at what point does somebody like, Wow, this went way too far. You need to step, if you're importing rice or if you're importing rice to Vietnam or goats to Afghanistan, you need to take a step back and reassess kind of everything. Yeah, there's a common sense kind of question about, okay, to what purpose? Like at what point have you lost the political in any of this story? All right, angry, plaintiff listeners, want to pause their four break? We'll be right back after this.

All right, angry plant listeners. Welcome back. Do you think we are stuck with the term proxies? Why has this become so popular? It's a really good question. Why it's become popular? I would love for us to retire it. Absolutely. But I also find, in part, in part, my own reasons for still talking about it or still using it occasionally, which is to not be left out of the debate. I think there is a certain momentum to. this that I think if I take the stubborn academic route and I say, but I refuse to use the term, then there are other people that are happy to use the term and then they'll sell the air as well. So, I mean, I do think that there are risks to continue to use the term. You know, trapped in assumptions that already dominate these debates like money creates influence, which it may or may not, you know, like it may or may.

we just talked about a lot of money being spent in Vietnam and Afghanistan that did not create influence, right? And you see very, you know, repeated stories about failure rates. And I think, you know, that the, if there was more of a willingness to reconsider the debates, we could open up to new conversations, questions, and perspectives, and not take what's a variable, which is influence over partners and presume it's a constant that these are proxies, right? You work for me. That's a variable. That's not a constant. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do in part. I mean, you know, all of this, there's all these gradations in there and it would be nice to use terminology that that opened that up. And I think that a good deal of humility, a more humble term, would create a kind of a better debate at its heart.

Another aspect of your piece I thought was interesting was this notion, this notion of flexibility and control. And the idea that proxies using a proxy gives the patron nation both flexibility and control. Is that true? That's presumed in the model, right? But I think it does, everything is two-sided with these things. I think Iran is a clear case of this where you have Iran's use of a variety of local groups, Hasbalah, Hamas, the Hussis, right, all these different groups. It does provide them some flexibility and some influence in regional affairs that it would not have otherwise.

It also provides some flexibility in terms of its deniability, right? That it's not directly attacking Israel, right? but its partner group is attacking Israel. And so that provides some wiggle room for it to avoid direct retribution for the actions of its proxy groups. However, it doesn't have perfect control, right? That's part of why it has a deniability. But without having perfect control, you also then are responsible for actions that you may not have approved of or authorized. And so for that, you also are on the hook.

There's a bit of entrapment as well as flexibility that comes with these. There are risks to doing it. There are also benefits to doing it as far as Iranian foreign policy is concerned. Right. That perception of the wider control can really bite you in the ass. Yeah. You know? Because people are going to assume that you are responsible for every terrible thing that your local partner does, right?

Yeah, exactly. Like the United States, you know, kind of watched in horror as a lot of the sectarian violence, you know, was being, I mean, the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad was it complicit or at least passively complicit in a lot of like very horrible bits of violence that were occurring against Shia, I'm against Stuni Group, sorry, by these sheet and militants. And so it's this thing like you, this is the quote unquote government you're supporting. It does create that responsibility for those groups, too, even though you may be trying your best to stop that or have never been consulted at all. Can you tell me a little bit more about how proxies themselves manipulate their patrons? Yeah. So this is something I find really interesting because they have a lot of different methods that they use in some fascinating ways. I mean, some of this is classic weapons of the week, you know, just flying to patrons to buy time. You know, we saw this with Iraq with its, you know, anti, that it was promising that it would modify, you know,

sorry, Maliki, the Shia that was allied with the United States, was promising to kind of become more reconciliatory towards various Sunni groups. And part of that was just buying time and also managing its other patron Iran at that time. And so, you know, you have a lot of just dishonesty is one way of going about, telling the patron what they want to hear, and waiting for them to figure it out. You also have bargaining saying, well, I'll do this for you, but you need to give me more. They're also, you know, always, you know, looking to extract a bit more out of patrons, especially very wealthy patrons. also, you know, there are ways of, of, you know, just hooking the patron, like making them responsible. This entrapment can also be an issue. And then also, you, one thing that proxies tend to do is also look for alternative patrons.

So to manage where you get your sources and to look for alternative sources and to play different patrons off of each other to say, well, if you're not going to give me this system, then this other state will. and then I'll go with them. And then you're, well, you know, what you're going to lose future influence and these kinds of things. And that's why the direct idea that money buys you influence, they have a lot of political maneuvering that's possible on the ground that wealthy states don't always appreciate, or at least the publics of wealthy states don't always appreciate. And once you get the money, you can kind of do what you want, right? especially in a country where there is no Afghanistan's a little bit different because we did have, you know,

in Iraq is a little bit different depending on what time area you're looking at. But a certain point, like you're trusting your local partner to do what it said it's going to do. And that's not always, you know, if you're giving them what they want up front, you know,

they don't always follow through so they have their own motivations. They absolutely do. And so it's really tricky to know you know, how, you know, to appreciate that level of complexity is, is, is, it's tough task. So is it then time to retire the term proxy war? And is that even possible? I'd like to think it's possible. I don't, I think it's not going to happen any time soon. But I do think it will be one of those terms that will look back and say, oh, that was, that was not the best description for what we,

you were trying to actually say or I think that, you know, somebody smarter than me will come along and get an even more interesting kind of term that will kind of get at what we're actually trying to describe or what I would like to see is actually lots of different terms to be applied. If we could be more specific, it's because it's underspecified as a term, it becomes a catch-all for lots of stuff. And then that just adds to its relevance and also it's irrelevant. It's said more and it means less, right? This kind of thing. So I think that I would like to see it be retired and for us to have better, sharper conversations

about the types of violent interactions that we're describing when we're talking about these things. And also ones that are more willing to engage with what's happening on the ground and not have that consistent superpower reference that, that, that, that, that, that, you were talking about and that you guys are working on on your show too. So what are some of the terms then, if we're creating like a new language or a new, a new shared language of how we refer to these things. We've used local partners as one. I think you also read about resource deficient allies.

Yep. Yeah. I do think that there are terms that we, we, try to discuss, like, for example, asymmetric warfare is one of these things. When we talk about asymmetric warfare, we tend to build in the assumption that that means that one side is conventional and the other is unconventional or one side is wealthy, but the other is not wealthy. But what's interesting about asymmetric wars is how much asymmetry goes the other way and that the resource deficient side, the irregular warfare side, has a lot of advantages. They don't have

to play by the rules. They have advantage in local knowledge. They have the advantage of strategic initiatives. They pick when they fight and then they retreat. Like there's all kinds of different advantages to that, but it's built in the term asymmetric warfare, but it doesn't just go one way. Also goes the other way. So in terms of different terminology that we could use, I think it is interesting to think through what kinds of hierarchies we're talking about, like what kinds of levels of control do different foreign and local partners have with one another. But I think that we would need to have certain terminology that was reflective of the kind of the institutions that are

embedded within those partnerships. So I think, you know, a term ally would be something that's more about longstanding partnership, more dedicated partnership. You know, partners are more referred to a more transactional kind of like we're working together right here, but it may not be as committed as of an exchange, for example. Or if you really just, you know, trying to kind of mess up the system, are you trying to kind of create instability? Are you trying to change the status quo? I also think like the purpose of the partnership can also play a role in some of the language that we talk about. you know, like Iran being a revisionist, you know, this axis of resistance, like it's a revisionist state that is pushing kind of these local actors to push on on kind of upsetting the status quo in terms

of American and Israeli regional hegemony and then trying to push against that. And so I do think that that also, it's much easier to sow chaos than it is to create stability. So I do think that the purpose of those groups also has a role. but we do need a new kind way of talking about it because if we describe them all with the same terminology, but we're describing very different purposes and very different types of groups and how much influence foreign actors have over them as well. What are you working on? Several things. Right now, the book that I'm working on is thinking through local partners in a counterinsurgency doctrine in the United States. So I think that the United States looked towards colonial powers like the French again and the British to think through how do you win a counterinsurgency endeavor, especially the British models in Malaya, for example, without really thinking through state building at the same time.

So it's kind of like this is like state building by wish and money is different than how. how does this work with the violent means of a counterinsurgency offensive? So trying to really think through a little bit more of counterinsurgency theory. I know that is not attractive. Nobody wants to think these things do anymore. I think I'm the only human on the planet who actually wants to read the field manual 324 again and again. But I do think that we're going to encounter these kinds of circumstances again.

And I want us to take the time, us meaning the security studies community, to have really taken a time to think through what exactly is the theory behind the latest rendition of American counterinsurgency. And where are the pieces absolutely not matching up? And there's lots of places to do that. So I'm trying to do kind of a forensic academic breakdown about what this looks like. and what it doesn't look like because I think that, you know, having a clear-eyed view about what went wrong instead of like, oh, everything went wrong. It's a little, well, yeah. But what exactly and how and how do we get down to books that once upon a time seemed very straightforward and like a how-to manual that absolutely in practice did not work?

I mean, at the risk of launching us into a whole other discussion, it's always struck me that America specifically internalized, it's always fighting the last war, right? So it takes the lessons of Vietnam into Afghanistan and it doesn't go perhaps very well. And the next time we will take the lessons of Afghanistan into wherever we're doing it again. And it may not go very well. if we've learned any lessons from Afghanistan at all, that's a separate discussion too. Yeah. Well, that's kind of the idea, though.

I think I'm trying to say, to be more reflective to, to say what is baked into kind of American institutions that makes this kind of war so hard for Americans to do? And what are, you know, a little bit less about blaming others all the time? You know, So like, oh, is our allies war?

Is our allies war? But that's only said when we're in withdrawal. Until then, it's not our allies war. So, you know, it's one of those things we're just having a bit more introspection about the components of it in theory and then how that plays out in practice. And to pull from this idea, too, I think especially of this, like, where do we expect sovereignty to come from? How do you defend local sovereignty by violating it?

Like, how do these pieces actually work together? And I think there's a lot of contradictions there. And lots of people have pointed out several aspects, but I think there's more work to be done. Well, when you've got copies to send out, we'd love to have you back on the show and to talk about it. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. And to get your feedback ahead of time, too.

Love it. Thank you so much for coming on to AngryPen. Planet and walking us through this, where can people find your work or follow you? Yeah, so I'm on Twitter and then also, I guess, X, and then whatever it's called, formerly known as the platform formerly known as Twitter. And, yeah, also at Bowdoin College. Barbara, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Matthew.

Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. I know it's been a weird month. Here at the Angry Planet, things have been far more inconsistent than normal. I've had a very strange time, advice, my day job in the last month or so, that I think has affected me more than I realized. But hey, good and bad news. Bad news for me, good news for Angry Planet. They finally went ahead and laid us off.

As I am speaking to you now, it happened yesterday. It was a tense and unpleasant Lord, weekend and a month before that, there was a lot of time spent archiving various parts of the website with my wife who was the software engineer. You guys don't need to know all this.

Maybe this can all go in a forthcoming bonus episode. In fact, I think it will. But good news for Inger and Planet, things will get back to normal and more than normal as the output but will most surely increase. Again, thanks to all the listeners who have really been really kind, the people that are in the Discord.

You can get in the Discord through the Substack, which is AngryPlanit.substack.com. I look forward to continuing to do the show for many more years and for it to become kind of the main thing that I'm doing. So we'll be back again in a couple of. days with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.