Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  The next day, I visited the ramshackle provincial administrative offices. A dismal old clerk asked if I would pay $200 for the extra accreditation. I suggested $50. He agreed, but then each day brought more delays. I drifted around the city, befriended a man with a pet monkey named Johnny, drank beer at a bar owned by an Italian timber merchant, and sat on the steps of the church, looking out on the river Congo. There was no traffic on the water for lack of rain—the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s problems extend to central Africa. Drought has made the Congo’s water levels drop, and now it is full of dangerous shoals.

  Finally, on the third day of waiting, I told the old clerk at the provincial offices that I would leave without the new authorization. That of course would mean he and his boss might go without the $50 “fee” they required. The clerk looked concerned. Suddenly, the document was ready. It was handwritten on old, brown paper but stamped and signed. On the verso was a different, older document: a typed travel authorization for someone else who was on a veterinary mission, also to Isangi. It read, “Congo Belge, District de Stanleyville‚ Secrétariat . . . 7 février 1957.”

  Anatomy of the Ruins

  That document encapsulates how states fall apart and failed states, or semi-failed states, are important because they are so vulnerable to climate change. In failed states social breakdown is the norm; yet, governance and administration are never totally absent. They exist, but in spectral form. It is as if the failed state has reverted to older, tributary methods of domination and reciprocity. Because state failure is relative, in most so-called failed states government is a semifunctional ruin—the state as improvised afterlife. The “travel document” that the clerk in Kisangani gave me is a ludicrous, yet concrete example of this: a handwritten note on the backside of a fifty-year-old colonial document. One finds this type of bureaucracy amidst collapse in most failed states, where underpaid civil servants toy officiously with the components of a defunct colonial police apparatus, not for the sake of law and order but simply to extract survival-level bribes.

  Most failed or semifailed states are like that—they have hollowed out governments. Each has a flag, a currency, and a seat at the United Nations, but there is little or no law and order or functioning infrastructure. Failed states are not always apocalyptic war zones of Somalia-style mayhem. Though racked by spasms of violence, everyday life in failed states is more typically defined by the type of kleptocratic jumble found in the DRC.

  In places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Guinea-Bissau, and Ivory Coast, the state is a ghost: it appears and then disappears. You can see its outline and feel its presence, but it’s not really there. For example, in Kinshasa, capital city of the DRC, there is no real law enforcement, no publicsafety program, but there is a strict, North Korean–style prohibition against taking photographs, and the police enforce it vigorously. I was once detained for two hours because I took a photograph of a huge, futuristic Space Needle–like tower that soars above the slums, a broken relic of Mobutu Sese Seko’s architectural megalomania. During my detention, I slowly negotiated the “fine” down from $500 to $150.

  So it is in failed states, among the ruins of modernity past, the institutions of sovereignty rot and fade like old documents and the colonial offices that house them. On these political frontiers of the catastrophic convergence, the state in its coherent modern form has collapsed but leaves behind many of its bureaucratic components: its uniforms, insignia, paperwork, ministries and officialdom, like the hungry clerk in Kisangani. Only now, these forces take on a strange phantom life, akin to the severed limbs of a spider, each of which keeps twitching and struggling as if the organism were still whole. The police in the Congo demand permissions, travel passes, registrations, and receipts as if they were the agents of some great, centralized despotic state. But in reality, there are no dossiers, no database, and no real oversight or project of extending sovereignty. There is not even sufficient electricity or paper.

  Amidst this political rubble sprout superstition, ethnic hatred, tribalism, millenarian faiths, and violent instability. Entire national economies fall into the hands of organized crime. Conflict resources—like diamonds, timber, ore, and drugs—are the main products of these battered places. Foreign Policy magazine and The Fund for Peace maintain an index of failed states that uses thirteen criteria to determine a state’s relative failure. They look at mounting demographic pressure, massive population movements, legacies of vengeance, chronic and sustained migration, uneven economic development and inequality, sudden economic downturns, corruption, criminalization of the state, deterioration of public services, arbitrary use of state violence and human rights violations, the relative autonomy of the security forces, factionalism among state elites, and finally, external intervention by other states or parastate forces. It is a descriptive collection of indices that is also explanatory.2

  Development in Reverse

  To travel in failing states, the front lines of climate change, has a hallucinogenic quality, as if one were passing through, in reverse, the arguments made by Max Weber in his famous lecture “Politics As a Vocation.” In that essay Weber defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”3 A modern state is defined by that and other features, crucial among them the depersonalization of politics. In the modern state, the head of state does not own the government, its armies, offices, equipment, revenue, and personnel. In the modern state the politicians and the administrators are legally separated from the means of administration and the real and implied repression they depend on. And they cannot, or should not, use these means of administration for personal profit. This depersonalization and legal rationalization of political power and administration gives a modern state legitimacy.

  For Weber, political domination has three forms of legitimation: traditional domination rests on inherited patterns of age-old obedience; charismatic domination relies on the power, gifts, and personality of a specific leader; legal domination rests on “the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created rules. . . . This is domination as exercised by the modern ‘servant of the state,’” and thus by the modern state itself.4

  Thus, the crucial factor in modern states is that the “means of administration” are not private property. And it is the reversal of this—the reprivatization of the state and the repersonalization of politics and the privatization of war—that marks the start of state failure. Consider again the operative passages in Weber: “All states may be classified according to whether they rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is ‘separated’ from these means of administration. . . . The question is whether or not the power-holder himself directs and organizes the administration while delegating executive power to personal servants, hired officials, or personal favorites and confidants, who are non-owners, i.e. who do not use the material means of administration in their own right but are directed by the lord.”

  A paragraph later the old Prussian explains the evolution toward the modern form of state:Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and “private” bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts. The whole process is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the independent producers. In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization, which actually come together under a single head. No single official personally owns the money he pays out, or the buildings, stores, tools, and war machines he controls. In the contemporary “state”—and this is essential for the concept of state—the “separation” of the administrative staff, of the administrative official
s, and of the workers from the material means of administrative organization is completed.5

  In failed states it is the reverse. Power is repersonalized, the means of administration and repression reprivatized. Executive power—by which Weber means the power of decision making and execution—reverts from a centralized, legitimate institution back out to the institutional periphery, the officialdom that controls the apparatus of state: its offices, documents, dossiers, ministries, arms, checkpoints, and jail cells. These technologies are redeployed in a fragmented and parasitic fashion.

  The failed state’s bureaucratic disintegration produces a unique political geography: a patchwork sovereignty akin to the collage of authorities—king, church, cities, lords—that defined medieval Europe. The patchwork today appears to varying degrees, across parts of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East and Central Asia. Perhaps the capital city is run by the “presidential guard” or some of the paramilitary forces of the interior ministry, itself the property of its head man. That would be a description of Kinshasa as well as Kabul or Baghdad. Outside the capital, a renegade commander’s men control some crucial road to the border; you’ll find this in Congo, Afghanistan, and Colombia. Foreign troops—perhaps wearing blue UN helmets or NATO insignia—secure the areas around their bases, a few government buildings, road links, and airports. Bandits and rebels control the areas beyond. In more distant regions or provinces with resources or lucrative trade links, one might find an armed and autonomous governor who pledges allegiance to whatever central government the great Western powers have propped up but who is, in reality, his own boss running an independent substate. In the port city, it will come as no surprise if the real power is the top import-export merchant, who, by means of his great wealth, bribes the cops and calls the shots with local politicians. These features again describe parts of Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, the DRC, and Somalia, to name a few.

  These are the political patterns of fourteenth-century Europe, the political forms left by the collapse of Rome and in the wake of the plague.6 They are not the patterns of underdevelopment but rather those of social breakdown and political collapse. They are the institutional and political rubble of a past modernity. And increasingly they define the present.

  We see here a strange inversion of Walt W. Rostow’s “stage theory” of development and his idea of “economic takeoff.”7 Collapse, like development, is gradual, each stage building sequentially upon the conditions created by the previous stages. Like development, it can become a self-reinforcing process. The slide toward entropy and chaos is like the virtuous cycle of modernization and industrialization imagined by the West’s postwar planners—but in violent reverse.

  States, War‚ Crime

  If we read Weber in reverse, we would do well to consult Charles Tilly’s classic 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. The economic total for losses was estimated to be $43 billion.3 By 2011 serious malnutrition gripped the flood zone.

  In Afghanistan, the edge of the same weather system hit several eastern provinces, including Nangarhar, which was at the very periphery of the monsoon’s reach. Typically, August in Nangarhar is bone dry, with precipitation of less than five millimeters for the whole month.4 But that year, the skies opened, and the massive barrage of rain washed away crops, livestock, and twenty-five hundred houses, killing eighty people.

  According to the security reports, Nangarhar is not only either parched or flooded but also violent: Twenty-three mostly war-related incidents were listed during the week I made my visit in September 2006. According to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO), that week saw kidnapping threats, ongoing counterinsurgency operations, and “reported infiltration of a new group of AGE/Insurgents” made up of “Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis”; two vehicles used by “armed Taliban” were spotted in Sherzad District, and there were several rocket attacks. The ANSO reports portrayed a region beyond government control.

  Only the drug trade has kept this region afloat economically, but eradication is a constant, if often distant, threat. Wazir recounted the panic of the local farmers when a poppy-eradication squad came down from Kabul. “The eradication campaign came,
but they just took bribes,” said Wazir as we sat in his dera‚ a shaded outside visiting area, on rope and wooden cots called charpayi. “When we heard that they were coming, we went to the district governor and negotiated a price.” Wazir told me that the local commander, named Hasil, was chosen as the farmers’ envoy. After taking bribes, for the sake of the cameras the police destroyed some old, dry, spent poppy fields.

  “If the governor had not accepted the bribe, we were ready to fight. If a farmer loses his poppy he can’t even have tea and sugar. He will borrow money from a rich person and lose his land.” Wazir said that emergency loans carry 100 percent interest rates.

  Climatic stress, an initial catalyst for Afghan instability, is now fueling violence. This is what the catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence and climate change looks like in Afghanistan: eroded soil, limited water, greedy police, foreign troops, popular anger, and an insurgency that protects poppy crops from eradication.

  The Role of Drought

  In 2008 the British government issued a report describing what climate change will do to Afghanistan: “The most likely adverse impacts . . . are drought related, including associated dynamics of desertification and land degradation. Drought is likely to be regarded as the norm by 2030, rather than as a temporary or cyclical event. . . . Floods due to untimely rainfall and a general increase in temperature are of secondary importance. However, their impacts may be amplified due to more rapid spring snow melt as a result of higher temperatures, combined with the downstream effects of land degradation, loss of vegetative cover and land mismanagement.”5