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Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
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15 Aug, 11 tweets, 3 min read
Years ago I ran into a friend in Helmand Province who was on an advisory team supporting the ANP. He told me about how one of the police chiefs was widely known to rape prisoners during interrogations. Been thinking a lot about the look on his face as he told me that.
His helplessness was understandable. Two years earlier a Green Beret beat the shit out of his Afghan counterpart for keeping a 12-year-old dancing boy chained to his bed...
....and he was almost kicked out of the Army for it. We were tacitly giving our moral endorsement to the worst people in Afghanistan.
theolympian.com/news/local/mil…
The only thing that kept things from completely falling apart was that the Taliban wasn't much better. Helmand was a TB stronghold, but it was mostly so-called small-t taliban who for one reason or another fell on that side of the conflict.
They were glorified warlords at best, usually no more than literal highway robbers. And had all the vices as other warlords: they sold opium, kept dancing boys, and generally terrorized the population.
bostonjournal.net/on-afghan-high…
They weren't even good fighters. Man for man the Afghan security forces, as bad and demoralized as they were, could beat them.
There was constant tension between them and the big-T Taliban senior leadership across the border in Quetta who tried to rein them in. Treatment of the civilian population was a major issue for them.
refworld.org/docid/530b189d…
It's hard to overstate how big an issue the institution of bacha bazi was in particular. The Taliban originally rose to power on a wave of popularity by executing anyone who kept dancing boys.
To the extent that Coalition strategy was successful, it was arguably by keeping senior Taliban leadership out of day-to-day affairs. When they could project their reach, they were far more disciplined and capable than run-of-the-mill local commanders.
defensemedianetwork.com/stories/attack…
Meanwhile we couldn't even get Afghan counterparts from getting high before going on patrol. It shouldn't surprise anyone that once Taliban leadership had freedom to operate, they were able to whip local Taliban franchises into much more capable fighters.
The speed of their advance has been shocking, but the end result was completely predictable. A shame it took so long to realize that.

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More from @byzantinemporia

Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
15 Jul
How crop failures in the Soviet Union helped clean up the Great Lakes

In the early 1970s, Russia and the Ukraine had a series of bad harvests, putting the entire USSR at risk of famine. In 1972 the US government agreed to subsidize $300 million in sales of grain.
Soviet cargo ships sailed up the St. Lawrence waterway and into Lake Michigan, where they docked at Port of Indiana, a major transshipment point for Midwestern grain. This trade continued through the 70s and into the 80s.
At the time, the Great Lakes suffered from large algal blooms, owing to the nitrogen in agricultural runoff from the surrounding farmlands.
Read 6 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
15 Jul
In 1182, Saladin launched a daring attack by land and sea on Beirut.

It was a sharp break from his usual raids into enemy territory and skirmishes with the Crusaders. But at a deeper level, it was part of a consistent strategy that ultimately brought him victory.

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Beirut stands on a broad triangular promontory, which in Saladin’s time was covered with fields and orchards. The medieval city stood on its northern edge and was endowed with one of the finest harbors in the Levant.
Beirut was obviously an attractive target, but this was uncharacteristically bold for Saladin. This was not just a raid: it was an attempt to seize and hold ground in the middle of Crusader territory.
Read 24 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
28 Nov 20
THE DOME OF HAGIA SOPHIA

Why was the Hagia Sophia such an achievement? Not least because it was the world’s largest domed basilica for 1000 years.

Domes in turn helped deal with a very ancient problem in the Mediterranean: earthquakes.

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Earthquakes have always been a fact of life in the seismically-active Mediterranean, occasionally collapsing buildings or even entire cities. Three of the Seven Wonders of the World, for instance, were destroyed by earthquakes.
Civilizations adapted: the Mycenaeans used large rough-hewn stones to construct their palaces—so-called Cyclopean architecture—which might have had an anti-earthquake function: gaps dampened the shock waves, and large stones could shift without the entire structure collapsing.
Read 27 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
26 Nov 20
THANKSGIVING THREAD

The First Thanksgiving in 1621 celebrated both the Pilgrims’ survival & their friendship with the Wampanoag Indians.

One Mayflower passenger was especially close to the Indians, and was one of only two to have visited the New World before: Stephen Hopkins.
In 1609, Hopkins was on the fateful Sea Venture expedition to the newly-founded Jamestown colony in Virginia to provide supplies and deliver a new governor. They hit a bad storm (possibly a hurricane) en route and were shipwrecked on Bermuda.
All aboard were saved and the island had plenty of food. The governor took charge and set the men to work gathering food, building shelters, and constructing pinnaces to sail to Virginia, where the other ships of the expedition had safely arrived.
Read 23 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
23 Nov 20
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

For all their machinations, the Borgias and Medici looked like petty manipulators when a real army showed up.

There was only one serious power player in Renaissance Italy.... Image
...and that was (unfortunately) the Venetians.

No one else could withstand the combined powers of Europe, slip through the cracks in their alliances, and come out ahead.

Only the Ferrarese came remotely close, able to hold their own in extremely adverse circumstances and maintain their independence. Not least because they invested heavily in defenses and were great artillery innovators:
Read 4 tweets
Byzantine Emporia Profile picture
18 Jun 20
Elite overproduction is the single most important concept for understanding the most destructive upheavals in society: 3rd-c. Rome, 14th-c. Constantinople, 18th-c. France.

"Too many Chiefs, not enough Indians."
The Venetians understood this implicitly. As silly as their constitutional system was, they realized the biggest threat to their republic came from intra-elite civil war.
Another way of framing this:
Do individuals gain more from the increasing societal prosperity or from increasing their own social status?

Once it becomes the latter, the value of status symbols undergoes massive inflation.
Read 6 tweets

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