Democracy's forces can't beat demography's power
Even in the age of high-tech warfare, shifts in the world population give a military advantage to 'underdeveloped' countries
The word jingoism originated from a music hall ditty of the Boer War: "We don't want to fight", it ran, "but by jingo if we do, we have got the men, we've got the guns, we've got the money too." A hundred years later it often seemed that Tony Blair was intent on pursuing the reverse policy — always up for a fight but painfully short of the means to pursue it.
The pressure that this put on our Forces is well known. But another factor that has had a huge bearing on our ability to wage war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq has received much less attention.
For decades, strategists have maintained that raw numbers should no longer be a decisive factor in military thinking. In an age of high-tech warfare, professionalism, training and technology are supposed to be the keys to military success, not population. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan none of this has helped anything like as much as the experts predicted — and demography has had a lot to do with it.
The problem has been that, even for a power as mighty and sophisticated as the US, occupying a Third World country with a fast-growing population means putting an uncomfortably large number of boots on the ground.
In Iraq, the Pentagon struggled right from the start to find enough troops to control the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Now much the same thing is happening in Afghanistan. Britain discovered this 90 years ago when we occupied Iraq in 1918 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Iraq's population at the time was 2 million, compared to about 45 million in the United Kingdom. Even so we had to deploy more than 100,000 troops to hold the country in the face of tribal unrest and nationalist insurgency, and even with that many men we were hard pressed to keep control.
In terms of numbers the West still held the upper hand compared to the Middle East until well after the Second World War. In 1950 all the Arab countries together had a combined population of only 60 million, compared with nearly 160 million in the US and a combined total of 120 million for Britain, France, and Spain — the three European powers that then still ruled territory in the Arab world.
By 2000 the demographic balance had changed dramatically. The Arab world had increased fourfold to just over 240 million, not far short of America's 284 million. Over the same period the population of Iraq increased even faster, from under 6 million in 1950 to 25 million in 2000 — and 30 million today. In Afghanistan (which is not an Arab country) it went up at a similar pace, from 8 million to 20 million by 2000, and approaching 30 million today.
Thanks to their high fertility, these countries are also now much younger than the West. Between 1950 and 2000, the average age in America rose from 30 to 35, and in Europe from 30 to nearly 38 — the oldest of any continent. In Iraq and Afghanistan the average age fell over the same period; in Iraq it was only 18 in 2000 and 16 in Afghanistan. The result, as America and Britain have discovered to their cost, is that both have disproportionately large reserves of fighting-age men.
In a region that is already unstable, fast-growing young populations — usually with plenty of time on their hands — are highly likely to spell trouble, even if Western nations steer clear of them. Across the Middle East, youth unemployment was estimated by the International Labour Organisation at 25 per cent in 2003, the highest in the world.
And, as elsewhere in the developing world, more and more of the population are concentrated into the slums of large cities. Within ten years more than 70 per cent of the region's population will be urban, with a quarter living in cities with populations of one million or more. For any potential invader, demography like this is a nightmare.
Just how much of a nightmare was the subject of a famous article in 1995 entitled "Force Requirements in Stability Operations" by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand Corporation and a leading authority on the subject.
In it he pointed out that "the populations of countries in the underdeveloped world have expanded markedly relative to the population of the United States. More particularly, the populations of Third World countries have expanded even more dramatically relative to the size of the American military."
Quinlivan's conclusion was that "first, very few states have populations so small that they could be stabilised with modest-sized forces. Second, a number of states have populations so large that they are simply not candidates for stabilisation by external forces."
Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq, it should be pointed out, is an especially large country by the standards of today's developing world. Iran is two and a half times as numerous as Iraq, while Pakistan's population is nearly six times that of Afghanistan. And what goes for Middle Eastern demography is also true of Africa. In 1950 the countries that now comprise the EU had a combined population one and a half times that of Africa. Now Africa outnumbers the EU by more than two to one, and by 2050 the ratio is expected to be five to one.
Many Western leaders, however, still appear to think that they can hold sway over both regions, much as they did 50 or 100 years ago. What such thinking ignores is the enormous shift in the balance of world population that has occurred since the days of empire — and is still continuing. Europe began the 20th century with 25 per cent of the world's population and finished it with 12 per cent. By the middle of the century that figure is projected to fall to only 7.5 per cent.
One of the most important lessons of both the insurgency in Iraq and the battle against the Taleban in Afghanistan is that not only is the power of numbers now on their side not ours, but in future the disparity is going to get only greater.
Richard Ehrman is deputy chairman of Policy Exchange. The Power of Numbers will be published next week by Policy Exchange and the University of Buckingham Press
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6626293.ece
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