We'll Always Have Kabul

The news media, ever reliable ally of truth, are reporting that the Obama Administration is considering a change in their approach to the interminable mess in Afghanistan. Apparently as a nation we can only deal with one interminable mess at a time, although it appears to me we have quite few before us, and not just of the foreign kind. Anyway, I seem to recall that other stalwart world powers like the Soviet Union and the British Empire eventually came to reassess their approaches to Afghanistan at one point or another. In fact, if the conventional wisdom on the matter is accepted, Alexander the Great was the last tyrant bent on world domination who successfully subdued the various Afghan tribes, although how completely subdued they were is a matter of some debate. In any event, Alexander’s successor to the problem of Afghanistan, the Seleucid Empire, had almost totally lost control of what is now Afghanistan less than 150 years after Alexander’s death. It is, after all, hard to keep a good man down.

Alexander’s approach to Afghanistan, or any place on his list, for that matter, was generally to completely annihilate anyone who opposed him and reduce their cities to rubble. Throughout history, many national leaders have found this to be an effective short-term solution to strident opposition. The Soviet Union tried to utilize this strategy in their effort to bring world socialism to the Afghan people, but they were not completely committed to the effort and just couldn’t go the extra mile necessary to kill every last man woman and child. The second part to Alexander’s strategy was to seek out those tribes he had not already obliterated and offer them a reasonable accommodation for their cooperation. He would let them live, give them a reasonable amount of local autonomy and let them keep some of their money if they promised not to cause trouble or support his enemies, and if they would send an appropriate number of young men to feed his war machine. Not a bad deal, all things considered.

The British spent a lot of time and effort in the 19th Century trying to frustrate Russian aims in Afghanistan, taking quite an embarrassing beating from the Afghans in the First Anglo-Afghan War, and even though they ultimately achieved most of their political and territorial aims, they came at great cost and were largely ephemeral. The lesson that Alexander, the British Empire and the Soviet Union learned and that America will ultimately have to face is that you never really “win” in Afghanistan; territory which is pacified only remains so as long as the soldiers remain. The Afghan people apparently are largely disinterested in being part of a geopolitical “solution” and attempting to graft new institutions onto the abbreviated social framework of a largely feudal system is not likely to be a long-term success.

I thought the reason we went to Afghanistan was to kill the people that had planned and executed dastardly attacks upon our national interests and our nation itself. Somehow the mission evolved into correcting 3,000 years of screwed up history. I acknowledge the argument that Afghanistan as a failed state presents a threat to the United States by being a haven for miscreants, but there are a number of such places on earth and we really can’t afford financially, socially or morally to occupy every place which might sprout a terrorist movement at some point. One might even argue that attempting to do so simply facilitates the resentment which makes us targets of the unfocused frustration and anger of the world’s poor and ignorant. I was all for eviscerating the douche-bags that killed so many innocent people for such ridiculous reasons, but I may have been like a lot of people who failed to distinguish between justice and revenge in my haste to blame disaster on everybody in the world who failed to support America enthusiastically enough.

I understand that our involvement in Afghanistan is a complicated issue. We have legitimate strategic interests in that part of the world and we have friends who have accepted a great deal of risk to support us. We are at least partially responsible for the mess that Afghanistan found itself in after the Soviets left because of the manner in which we intervened in the conflict and a destabilized Afghanistan could easily be an invitation to all sorts of evil, much of which could haunt us again. I’m not saying there is an easy answer, but we will inevitably find that indefinite escalation will be socially and financially disastrous. Afghanistan will not be subdued by force, and we have neither the patience nor the wisdom to transform the ass-end of God’s creation into anything approximating a stable, peaceful nation.

I have never been to Afghanistan, but I understand that it is a contradiction of lush, verdant valleys and arid, inhospitable mountains. The people are known for their inordinate hospitality as well as their fiercely independent pride in their ragged, backward land. You can marry at the age of nine, and be stoned to death for adultery. A large part of the economy relies on opium and hashish production, but a mini-skirt will get you 40 lashes with an unhygienic whip, if not worse. The Afghans have traditionally been pretty well content to kill each other over petty grievances and real or imagined slights and seldom messed with anyone who didn’t come looking for trouble. Thrusting these simple and quarrelsome people to the center of the world stage and using them as some sort of barometer of the progress of 21st Century American idealism is a goofy proposition. The sooner we realize this, the less names will have to be inscribed on that future wall of stone and the less solemn tears will have to be shed to the accompaniment of our retrospective self-recrimination.