Review, Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion (1)

Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion, Palgrave Macmillan (2001) 

This book is extremely important for readers interested in understanding the present crisis in Russian relations with the West. Part of the reason it is valuable is that it was published at the dawn of the Putin Era, in the very year that the United Russia Party was founded. This book therefore is a look at the future from before the later revival of the Cold War.

THE PREMISE

Still, it's very clearly a polemical book. The author, Janine R. Wedel, soon after became a professor at George Mason University.¹ An obvious implication of her subsequent books was that market economies represent an ideal of fairness, that can be achieved (and usually has been in the past). The author's critique of collusion in Central/Eastern Europe (CEE) was a prologue to her own private campaign against collusion in the West—where government officials retire to seven-figure salaries at the firms they erst regulated.² Whereas her early work on USAID/HIID scandals in CEE focused on unethical/illegal collusion by Americans on foreign soil, her later work acknowledged this as a problem afflicting the West as well—indeed, the problem of the modern West.

As a consequence, while the book delves into sordid details about the administration of US aid to to CEE, there's no effort at balance: every decision made by US administrators of the aid is alleged to be wrong. I was struck by the spectacular one-sidedness: several times, comparing US assistance to EU assistance, she describes USAID programs with quotes from a partisan critic, while describing European programs in the words of the ministries that conceived them.³  More confusingly, the difference between USAID and the EU member states was not quite as cut-and-dried as she says. A lot of overseas development aid (ODA) was multilateral, flowing through institutions like the World Bank Group, the IMF, and the EBRD. Bilateral aid from Europe was more likely to take the form of trade credits rather than grants. Once one sorts out all this, the main difference was that the US government sought to bypass governments, and the European governments (in Central Europe, especially) did not (p.37). A logical problem with this is that European governments were relying on internal structures (their own finance ministries) to manage aid programs in support of governments directly—an intrinsically opaque system, which explicitly pursued close personal ties between the donor government and the officials of the government that was supposed to be reformed.

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Some More Thoughts on Historical Inevitability

A long time ago I posted some writings on historical inevitability (Part 1, 2). Recently I reviewed Bruce Riedel's book, What We Won: America's Secret War in Afghanistan, in which he made the case that (a) the US government successfully brought down the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe by aiding the Afghan rebels, and (b) this effort did not bring about the rise of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. My criticisms of his book made the argument that he had gotten it backwards: Western support for the Afghan rebels did not cause the collapse of the USSR, but it did lead to the rise of deadly sectarianism.

However, Mr. Riedel makes an argument that I think is valid, even if it's wrong in the case where he applies it. In other words, he objects to historical reasoning backwards from an event, to where one assumes planners and actors either knew, or ought to have known, the ultimate consequences of their actions. My criticism was that he was applying this to a case where the Central Intelligence Agency clearly ought to have known the consequences, and making claims about causality that are clearly false. The USSR's fall was almost certainly not hastened by its failed war in Afghanistan; there was little reason to expect funnelling money to the insurgents there would accelerate this. A more likely outcome was the occurance of a major war in Central Europe, or deadly attacks on US government employees. That neither of these occurred is good luck, not skill or prudence on the part of the US deep state.

I've already addressed my views about CIA support for ISI and the mujaheddin in my review. Riedel's claim that the CIA was not to blame for the fact that its material aid went to taqfiri zealots, on account of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency (GIP) actually managing access to the mujaheddin, is not an excuse—it's not even a bad excuse. But in other cases, it is a fallacy to reason backwards like this.

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Review of Bruce Riedel What We Won: America's Secret War in Afghanistan Brookings Institution Press (2014)

This book has been very well-received in most serious circles.  The author, who advised President Barack Obama on Afghanistan policy from the beginning¹, has a startling message: Western intelligence agencies, including the American CIA, Britain's MI5, and others, did help defeat the USSR by supplying the mujahidden rebels in Afghanistan; but they were certainly not responsible for the appearance of groups like the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  The main error of the USA in supporting the mujahidden was to abandon them after February 1990.  These are the main points, and I would like to explain why they are implausible.


A few points of clarification before I begin: one, I am NOT a member of any intelligence organization.  I have no security clearance; I'm only reviewing a book based on publicly available information.  Two, the ISI is the Directorate of  Inter-Services Intelligence  of the Pakistani armed forces, which was the principal interlocutor of the CIA during the secret war in Afghanistan.²  Three, the USA has been a major supplier of foreign aid to Pakistan since independence (with the exception of a brief interlude, which I'll mention below)³; in addition, or separately, the CIA funneled money directly to the mujahidden⁴). So when writers speak of the US "abandoning" Af-Pak" after the Soviet withdrawal, there's reason to question this narrative.  I'll discuss that below also.
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