War and empires

THE CUTTING-OFF WAY: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800

Author: Wayne E Lee

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press

Pages: 287

Price: $29.95

SHADOW EMPIRES: An Alternative Imperial History

Author: Thomas Barfield

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Pages: 366

Price: $35

WHAT THE TALIBAN TOLD ME

Author: Ian Fritz

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 288

Price: $29.99

By Thomas E Ricks

One of the benefits of studying the military histories of non-European groups is that it reminds us that there are very different means of waging war, as well as reasons for doing so.
 

In The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America Wayne E Lee argues that the fluid, Native American style of war was quite alien to the European soldiers who encountered it. Tribes like the Tuscarora and the Cherokee avoided battles and conventional sieges, instead carrying out dispersed campaigns of ambushes and raids, which could be sustained for years. They often travelled light, subsisting on parched corn supplemented by occasional hunting, and fought in loose formations that rewarded individual initiative and marksmanship.
 

The weakness of the Indian way of war was that it was difficult to operate continuously, a fact that European foes exploited. In turn, Native American fighters saw that the key vulnerability of British, Spanish and French military expeditions was their long supply lines.
 

Being good at conquest isn’t just about logistics and battle tactics. Today’s anti-“woke” warriors in Congress likely would be surprised by the Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield’s insightful Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History. Barfield concludes that one key to building a successful empire is the management of diversity — ethnic, religious, cultural, geographic and economic. “Empires were not only comfortable with diversity, they thrived on it,” he writes.
 

The Umayyad Caliphate of the eighth century, for example, stretched from Spain to Central Asia, areas that had never come under the same polity before. In an interesting analogy, Barfield writes that the Umayyads ran a “franchise empire,” not unlike McDonald’s, in which local governors, or franchisees, were free to “adapt local customs as long as they maintained basic commonalities.”
 

Barfield concentrates his imaginative retelling of world history on the domains that dominated the Eurasian landmass for centuries, especially the Chinese, Roman and Persian empires. Of those three, his favourite is the Persian system. For one thing, they did better at managing leadership succession; new rulers emerged from among the royalty, but there wasn’t a strict queue for the throne. This balance, he asserts, kept Persian rule “from becoming so insular and unworldly that it could no longer govern effectively, as often occurred in China, but avoided the free-for-all civil wars that periodically debilitated the Roman Empire.”
 

But many of these empires possessed a common vulnerability, Barfield finds: They were essentially built to control agrarian societies and were unable to adjust to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism.
 

Barfield concludes by turning that analysis on today’s great powers. The People’s Republic of China, he says, resembles an even more precarious imitation of the old agrarian empires that collected revenue from peasants and in turn gave them security and stability, but no political voice. The country, he writes, in trying to suppress non-Han ethnic groups, has inherited “the Qing’s territorial base but not its cosmopolitan outlook.”
 

He is most pessimistic about Russia, which he says operates as if it were the medieval Grand Duchy of Muscovy but armed with nuclear weapons. He suggests that Vladimir Putin may be leading his country toward a new version of the anarchic, famine-ridden Time of Troubles that plagued the Russian Empire from 1598 to 1613.
 

Barfield is an expert on Afghanistan, which Ian Fritz, who served as a US Air Force linguist in that country, distinctly is not. I wanted to like Fritz’s What The Taliban Told Me. These are the sort of books young men write when they realise that their empire has sent them to kill without regard to the effects that doing so will have on those who are killed or on those who do the killing.
 

The book is lively at times but ultimately disappointing. I had hoped to learn from this book how the Taliban fought. But the enemy in Afghanistan didn’t tell Fritz much except they didn’t want him there.
 

Mainly, the war drove him crazy. As he puts it, “My consciousness was blown up.” But that doesn’t mean Fritz developed an understanding of the war or the nation. He states, for example, that “Afghanistan as a country is little more than a fairy tale” constructed by Western colonialism, which is simply incorrect. The roots of the nation go back at least to the 18th century, and arguably to Mahmud of Ghazni — the first ruler to be a “sultan” — around the beginning of the 11th century.
 

Inadvertently, his memoir mirrors the American war in Afghanistan, which amounted to an imperial expedition executed incompetently, even carelessly, and certainly without the cultural and historical understanding that successful 

empires so valued.

The reviewer is The New York Times’ military history columnist.

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