Friday, August 20, 2021

Breaking Eggs

I am admittedly only piecing things together; and I state up front unequivocally that my expertise in the matters of Afghanistan:  culture, history, government, what have you, is nil.  That all I really know about it is the Soviet experience there (they gave up; Americans tried to give themselves credit for that, but I think that was overblown jingoistic bullshit.  Besides, what good did it do us?), the experience of the Brits there in the 19th century, when their empire was truly the greatest in the world (they gave up on it, too), and Rudyard Kipling's story "The Man Who Would Be King."

That last is actually pertinent here, because it echoes in fiction what I read as fact (I'll accept it as such without further verification) here:

My father, who taught international relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, learned Dari and went to Afghanistan in 1969, had a simple answer: U.S. forces should leave the country immediately.

I thought I knew better. “But then the Taliban will come back,” I objected.

“That’s possible,” my father acknowledged.

“So we need to stay to establish a functioning government,” I continued.

“It can’t be done,” my father explained.

He didn’t just mean that conquerors from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Union had failed.

He meant that even Afghans had never really run their country from the center. When my parents had been there in 1969, the king was effectively little more than the mayor of Kabul. My father remembered him driving around the putative capital city at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle.

On the road to Herat, my parents had encountered tribesmen who, my father recalled, were so unaware of the affairs of the country as a whole that they expressed no interest in the word “Afghanistan” — or maybe they had never heard the word at all.

That latter part echoes Kipling's story of two British adventurers who go off into the wilds of Afghanistan to find tribes who have never heard of the British or, for that matter, of Afghanistan.  Playing on this innocence (or ignorance), they make themselves powerful by introducing military training (something which both men have only passing knowledge of) and firearms, which, IIRC, they have brought with them.  Everything goes swimmingly until one of the Brits gets above his station and violates the tribal customs of the people he is "king" over, and they decide he's not a deified ruler after all, but just a man, and not a very good one at that.  And it all goes to smash, of course; with the two men representing in metaphor what happened to the British there (though whether Kipling meant that or not is another question).  That's my memory of the story; corrections as to details will be appreciated.

The main takeaway from the story is that, in the 19th century, tribes were living in the mountains of Afghanistan, aware of themselves as no more than tribes, and probably as unaware of the great affairs of state in Europe as a fruitbat would be; and as uncaring.  And if that 20th century picture of life in Afghanistan is right, nothing has changed.  After all, the Soviets swept through and all they left behind was the Taliban, which after all is who Charlie Wilson was helping out.  Then we swept through and after 20 years, what are we left with?

Well, when we started we at least had Tom Friedman telling us the Afghanis were just like the Japanese after WWII:  people living in a mountainous region just waiting for the U.S. to set them up as capitalists in a global economy.  Nobody bothered to mention Japan was already an industrial economy before WWII, and already heavily influenced by Western culture to boot. with an established central government.  Three things no one could say about Afghanistan before 9/11.

But while the rest of us were paying attention to the invasion of and growing quagmire in Iraq, elites who believed the US could do for Afghanistan what it did for Japan kept arguing, as Feldman articulated it, that we "had a fundamental interest, indeed a moral obligation, to succeed where others had failed." He added: "Instead of conceding to the return of warlords and dictators and the oppression of women, as we had traditionally done throughout the Muslim world, the time had come to embrace and enable democratic rule."

Yeah, how'd that whole "embrace and enable democratic rule" thing work out?  Funny how that doesn't even come up anymore, even with regard to Afghanistan.

John Stoehr wants to blame "America's political elite" for this; which, frankly, is like Trump blaming the "Deep State" for his ignorance and failures.  But Stoehr's error is more fundamental than ignorance:

I think America's political elite — which, let's not forget, includes the Washington press corps, especially its military affairs correspondents — could have tolerated Biden's decision to end the war if the war's end had come quietly. It didn't, though, and there's the real problem.

Biden's "mistake" wasn't about when to evacuate, how many and where to? His "mistake" was "allowing" a situation to unfold that drew the attention of normal Americans to the fact that America's political elites failed and that 20 years of profound failure discredits them almost totally. The process of discrediting political elites started around the same time the occupation of Afghanistan began, that is, with the United States Supreme Court ruling in the case of Bush v Gore. What happened over the weekend put the face of human suffering on it. 

He's thinking like the "bomber" at the Capitol recently (who had no bomb; there's a metaphor in that, too), or the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, or any number of people who've committed acts of violence because they think that will spark the "revolution" they long for.  Stoehr doesn't call for violence, but he thinks "the people", i.e., those who are not the "political elite," now see the weakness of the political elite and will be fools no more! And that's why the media narrative is solidified into declaring "chaos" in Afghanistan (even as, I would point out, America and its allies have removed 7000 people already, and expect to remove at least 10,000 more, and reports are the Taliban is trying to control the crowds.  Of course, there are also reports the Taliban has "checkpoints" many Afghanis can't get through, so....).  Whatever is actually happening in Afghanistan now, however much the Administration tried to prepare people for the change in government, the media narrative must be that "chaos" has overwhelmed a previously....unchaotic country?

Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and it depends on people not really paying attention to Afghanistan, and only paying attention to the narrative du jour.  Now, if those same people are seeing, instead, "that America's political elites failed and that 20 years of profound failure discredits them almost totally," is that a hint we're going to move back to Trump and Bannon?  Because that's their tune, isn't it?  Or is it that now "we the people" are going to pay attention to Afghanistan and learn the "right" lesson, despite the fact most Americans can't find that country on a map and probably aren't all that concerned with the "crisis" there.  Most media narratives, after all, are a product of editors and reporters guided by "if it bleeds it leads" (pictures of masses of people and airplaines being chased down runways by crowds are much more interesting than explanations of 20 years of error that led to this); they aren't the grassroots demands of American citizens for the public pillories for those in power at the moment.

That's Washington's game; and it's played for the entirely cynical reasons of power and leverage and short-term gain.

I conclude, not neatly, but with another Twitter thread, this from David Frum. It's less about the geopolitics and history of Afghanistan than about politics in America. It's also a better analysis than Stoehr's; which makes it a good place to take this examination: Here I will insert that I agree with Stoehr and Noah Feldman's father: a stable government in all of Afghanistan was never going to happen. Pay close attention to that analysis and you'll see that Afghanistan very nearly became Obama's Vietnam.  Intersting how the comparisons of those two situations show more similiarities than differences.
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