Volume 7, Issue 4, Winter 2022 25 A noteworthy thing about the layer of strategic stratigraphy just laid down in Afghanistan is how neatly it overlaps with past efforts. NATO ‘castles’ were often built around the remains of Soviet fortified outposts, which in turn were heaped on the site of derelict British fortresses, some of which rested on even older ones built by or against invaders ranging from the Mongols to the Macedonians. By 2010 it was reported that Afghanistan had 700 fortified bases and outposts, approximately 300 of them held by the Afghan national army and police—all now abandoned or held by the Taliban.[xix] Despite all the advancements in weapons and transport and communications technology that have occurred over centuries NATO troops very largely occupied the same places to do the same things as armies of the distant past. Overlooking every major road juncture, constricted transport route, and population centre was to be found a fortified installation. The distance between them: approximately one day’s march—a density of about one strongpoint for every 20-25 square kilometres. Their position: basically, where Alexander the Great located his forts. Their function: the same—observation, reporting, communications repeating, and overlapping patrolling. Combat Outpost (COP) Coleman in the eastern Kunar province was built around a nineteenth-century British border fortress, while COP Castle (the hint is in the name) in Helmand province incorporated a twelfth-century castle once besieged by Genghis Khan’s army. A full list of such examples would be very long.[xx] Where these structures differed marginally from their predecessors was in the profligate employment of HESCO bastion—essentially a modern gabion. A remarkably useful redesign of a very old piece of military technology, HESCO is to the War on Terror what the Huey helicopter was to Vietnam—effective, unglamorous, and ubiquitous. Arguably, thepeculiarly jury-riggedcharacterof the fortified posture of ISAF in Afghanistan was its undoing. The fact is thatmost troops deployed there– 90 per cent ormore–never or very rarely left their overtly armoured cantonments, in which (paradoxically, for a twenty-year campaign) they mostly lived in a ramshackle mix of tents and shipping containers. Big, fortified bases like Kandahar Airfield, or Bagram, with a day-time population like that of a mid-size town (and corresponding amenities and entertainments) cost hundreds of millions to build. Yet the ‘body language’ of their obviously temporary quality—containing nothing that could not either be packed in a transport or abandoned without much regret—was unmistakable: timidity rather than strength, lack of will rather than durability, and an ever-present urgency to leave.[xxi] Nonetheless, to look at a map of ISAF deployments in the country alongside maps of the castellation of Wales, the myriad English fortifications of Normandy in the Hundred YearsWar, or the network of forts along the riverine systems of the American West or Siberia is to recognize an obvious pattern. It is rather like the normal distribution statisticians show in a bell curve: a consistent repetition indicative of an underlying logic, in this case of how—now as before— pacification is enacted militarily on the ground.[xxii] III. Separation Up to the point that their empire began to stagnate and then contract the Romans pursued a predictable and very effective strategy. Where their armies encountered lands and people worth conquering, and where they had the capacity to do so, they did, brutally and relentlessly. Where they encountered opponents whom they could not conquer but with whom they could treat, i.e., come to agreements to which both sides would hold (more or less), they made lasting political arrangements. Where the empire abutted on people who they could not conquer but who lacked the political order to make meaningful treaties, they built walls. [xxiii] Hadrian’s Wall and the Limes through Germany between the Rhine and the Danube are well-known, and still visible, examples of this strategic logic. The collection of linear barriers constructed over centuries that make up China’s Great Wall arose out of similar conditions.[xxiv] What tends to pass popular recognition is quite how frequently, for how long, and how many societies have built such fortifications. Archaeologists have identified hundreds of pre-modern linear barriers ranging from dozens to hundreds of miles in length.[xxv] The boundaries in Western and Central Asia between steppe peoples and settled populations is especially littered with the colossal wrecks of forgotten walls.[xxvi] Continuous frontier fortifications of great scale are clearly back in style. The US-Mexico border, which has been progressively fortified over decades, though more controversially recently, is a case in point. Properly speaking, this sort of fortified strategic complex, is an anti-migration barrier rather than a conventional military defence. Likewise, Europe’s increasingly powerful border fortifications are designed as anti-migration barriers, though increasingly couched as a response to a ‘hybrid’ military threat in which population flows have been weaponised. Other examples of anti-migratory but highly policed linear barriers include the 3,000-mile India-Bangladesh border which has been progressively fortified in a multi-decade project first proposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early 1980s a few years before she was assassinated. [xxvii] Between 2001 and 2010 Indian security forces are estimated to have shot more than 930 Bangladeshis attempting to cross the border.[xxviii] By no means, however, is migration the single (or primary) Fortified Strategic Complexes David Betz
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