I wish it really were all like Four Lions

In the proud tradition of violent Islamic extremism being mostly counterproductive, a suicide bomber who seems to have been supporting Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (which has claimed responsibility against a rival group who had been taking over territory from TTP. They are referred to as "the Salarzai tribe," (though my reading in more specialized places suggests that going straight to tribal classifications is often not the best course, cough, understatement).

The counterproductive part is that while the bomber (gender apparently still in contention, no ID that I've seen anywhere) took out several of the intended targets, the chosen place for this event was...a World Food Programme event. The words coming to my mind go something like "I mean, honestly" but that doesn't seem right. It just seems, again, counterproductive--there was no other way to do this? Of course intimidation is a major part of coercing the local populace in any insurgency effort, but this sort of thing is not too far off from what lost al-Qaeda a lot of support elsewhere.

At any rate, 43 people were killed in this incident, and:

On Friday, a force of 150 militants in Mohmand Agency (just south of Bajaur), had targeted 5 checkpoints of the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani government paramilitary unit, killing 11 troops in the Safi and Baizai districts. Some 24 of the rebels were killed in a riposte by government sources. This attack also came in revenge for the Taliban having been expelled [by the Salarzai] from those areas of Mohmand Agency.

On Saturday, Pakistani troops using helicopter gunships came back after the insurgents, allegedly killing 40 of them in Baizai and Lakro villages.

This leaves the headline at "Over 80 Dead."

Juan Cole has a pretty good roundup of what all went down.

If only Four Lions were all there was to it.


[Note: embedded video is even worse now than it was before. Once upon a time I could adjust the size in the code, but not now, noooo. Link is all you get. Sorry.]

Wow

US totally grifted by random Afghan:

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

It really just kind of sums everything up, huh.

Memory

I have a couple of major posts about Israel lurking in the back of my mind, but I doubt I'll find the time or energy for them until after finals are over (oy). Instead, here's an image-heavy, slightly sappy post about Afghanistan. At the very least, the pictures are really worth scrolling through.


Foreign Policy has a gorgeous photo feature about the Afghanistan of the 1950s. It really underlines the tragedy that Afghanistan and Iran, among other Near Eastern and Central Asian countries, share--a past that seems almost unthinkable after it was wiped out and covered over by civil war or civil strife and extreme social repression.


I wrote an essay a couple of years ago that dealt with the treatment of Afghan women as one of its case studies, and my research for the paper turned up nostalgic accounts of this past, as the authors I read sadly sought to fix in history the fact that Afghanistan enjoyed a brief, but not negligible period of stability, higher education and far more equitable gender relations for about thirty years up until sometime in the 1970s (the year escapes me--Afghanistan is not an area of my expertise). The photos give that period a clearer face, and so in some ways a sadder sepia tint.



Afghanistan is one of the few cases where I feel pretty comfortable abandoning the relativist skepticism of broad negative statements that was drilled into my every pore as a liberal child of a liberal family in a liberal city getting a liberal education. I certainly don't mean to say that Afghan culture is necessarily or inherently retrograde, evil, or anti-women; but Afghanistan--and Yemen, while I'm rambling--are the two places from which stories of women's lives consistently go much further than making my feminist blood boil and induce a simple, awful sadness in me. It's a place with some really incredible cultural heritage, as an exhibit at the Met last year demonstrated beautifully (that is the only time I can actually remember buying the damn book at the gift shop--the combination of amazing artifacts and a syncretic tradition that I knew nothing about was irresistible).

There's just something tragic about a place spanned by the Silk Road, whose history includes Mesopotamian influences,


Hellenic influences,


South or Southeast Asian influences--there are things about this that remind me both of India and Cambodia--


and a nomadic culture that carried around artifacts like these:



(The crown is collapsible, if I recall correctly!) That is to say, a place whose heritage included all of this, as well as, eventually, some pretty great-looking record stores:


Only to have nearly all of it burned and bombed away. The collection that was loaned to the Met is only extant because some courageous museum workers hid it in the presidential palace; the rest of the Kabul Museum's collection was lost in the civil war.

From all of that (with, of course, a great deal of history in between about which I admit I know next to nothing), to dark streets and girls burning themselves to death rather than be sold in marriage to pay off opium dealers.

I hope I get a chance at some point to learn more about Afghanistan's rich history that is not quite so recent. The introduction to the FP photo essay begins:

On a recent trip to Afghanistan, British Defense Secretary Liam Fox drew fire for calling it "a broken 13th-century country." The most common objection was not that he was wrong, but that he was overly blunt. He's hardly the first Westerner to label Afghanistan as medieval. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince recently described the country as inhabited by "barbarians" with "a 1200 A.D. mentality." Many assume that's all Afghanistan has ever been -- an ungovernable land where chaos is carved into the hills. Given the images people see on TV and the headlines written about Afghanistan over the past three decades of war, many conclude the country never made it out of the Middle Ages.

But that is not the Afghanistan I remember.

It's important to remember not only what is lacking, but what was lost.

Two and two together

Marc Ambinder, who seems to have gotten some kind of fire lit under him in the past month or so--all of a sudden his stories are about forty times more interesting--has a brilliant piece about some of the interagency jockeying going on around the war in Afghanistan. It's a lesson in how to read for subtext and hidden information, and how much you need to know to be able to do so at all:

Greg Miller, the Washington Post's ace intelligence and national security reporter, poured a bucket of ice down the backs of American officials with his publication last night of a story about how U.S. special operations forces are hamstrung from pursuing high value targets in Afghanistan, even as they're quietly drawing up plans for direct military retaliation against entities who plan terrorist attacks in the United States. The Post chose to headline the story with what I thought to be of secondary importance -- the drawing of contingency plans for retaliatory attacks: "Options studied for a possible Pakistan strike." [...]

But the real interesting part of this story is subtextual. Miller is a fantastic journalist, and he has sources almost no one else has. But even the most voluble of sources chose to speak at moments when disclosing information would best advance their equities in a particular debate. So why are Miller's sources talking right now, and what message are they trying to communicate?

He proceeds to tell you his thoughts--which seem pretty plausible, but I'm hardly in a position to evaluate when it comes to the subtle discontents of CENTCOM vs. SOCOM in targeting procedures--and then wallops you at the end with a protip that, if you're me, leaves you gaping at the obvious genius of it while he vanishes cackling into the interweb.

By the way, note how two of the quotations in the piece use the word "punitive." If you've got some time today, run the word "punitive" and the names of the senior officers associated with the special operations command and see if you can figure out who likes to use that phrase a lot. (Do the same thing, incidentally, for the words "pulse" and "kinetic" and "senior administration official." That has nothing to do with this article, but it's going to be revealing, nonetheless.)

Trust, if I had any idea what the relevant names were, I would be happily digging around LexisNexis and not sitting here typing this.

Oh, just kill me now

The Camel Method, it seems, is a method of converting Muslims to Christianity by using the Qur'an.

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

Sure it is. And the rifle sights supplied to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan with Christian scriptures engraved on them are just a celebration of the manufacturing company's faith.

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the [manufacturer's] Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals." [...]

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group [the Military Religious Freedom Foundation] who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."

Well, hey, we'll get 'em from the inside and out. Use the Gospels to shoot 'em down on the battlefield and to convert them in the streets until soon there won't be any pesky Muslims to deal with anymore. At least, not any upper-case ones:

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

So what if there are a million ways of saying you're a believer in god that wouldn't elicit this kind of confusion? So maybe you have to engage in a little shell game to get your foot in the door. It's for their own good. Come to Jesus, hajji.

Once again, there's just nothing to say

On Wednesday morning, a suicide car bomber slammed into a Frontier Corps convoy of vehicles heading to inaugurate a girls school in the village of Kad, in the Lower Dir district of northwest Pakistan, killing 7 and wounding at least 130. Among the dead were 3 US troops in Pakistani dress and a Frontier Corpsman. The others were schoolgirls. The attack occurred as the convoy was reaching two girls' schools, one an elementary school and one a high school rebuilt with US funds. The force of the blast collapsed the high school's walls, but it was empty. Most of the wounded were schoolgirls in the elementary school, hit by flying glass and debris; ironically, given that the Taliban claim to be Muslims, some were having their class on Islam when the shrapnel hit them.

H/t Juan Cole.

Ouch

Juan Cole:

Gates went to Pakistan to emphasize to Islamabad that the US was not again going to abandon it and Afghanistan, as it had in the past. Pakistan, he wanted to say, is now a very long-term ally of Washington. He hoped for cooperation against the Haqqani, Taliban and Hizb-i Islami guerrillas. He wanted to allay conspiracy theories about US mercenary armies crawling over Pakistan, occasionally blowing things up (and then blaming the explosions on Pakistanis) in order to destabilize the country and manipulate its policies.

The message his mission inadvertently sent was that the US is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated; that he is pressuring Pakistan to take on further counter-insurgency operations against Taliban in the Northwest, which the country flatly lacks the resources to do; and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it.

Oof.

In, uh, less significant good news, I've written 18 pages of thesis!

Some quick hits

The situation for Afghani women isn't getting any better. There's not much new in the report, which could be fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, I guess; just a tragic sameness. I've posted about this topic before, and I wrote a paper that was about half on this subject. I don't really want to go over it again right now--it's too sad.

I'm getting to this way late, but Switzerland banned minarets a couple of weeks ago. In protest, a Swiss businessman built a minaret on top of his business in protest. Awesome.

Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more "scandalous" given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to "visit the country and to spend their money here."

The minaret, which has been in place since Tuesday, has "generated a lot of interest," he said, adding that he will wait and see before deciding if further action was needed to push his point.

I vote further action.

Andrew Sullivan flagged a video a while ago where a suicide bomber was interviewed on "All Things Pakistan." He titled the post "Interviewing Evil," which I object to--I think largely because I don't believe in evil. I'm not interested in this interview for purposes of staring into the underbelly of moral absolutes; I want to know what the suicide bomber thinks, that's all. Here's the video:



As always, there's more, but I'm too tired right now.

Okay, so the world kind of really is flat

The Taliban have a YouTube channel, called Istiqlal Media (istiqlal means "movement," in the sense of a political movement).

Setting aside the obvious ironies of the Taliban using technology invented in the US--which currently supports all manner of content they oppose--this is interesting. It's interesting in a bajillion ways: how does this dovetail with fundamentalist attitudes? What videos will YouTube take down vs. allow to stay up? How much will it help them?

Also, it's a confirmation of what David Rohde has been reporting about the Taliban's ambitions outside of Afghanistan:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

It's hard to imagine another motivation for the Taliban's starting a YouTube channel--it's not as though most Afghans have access to broadband.

YouTube so far seems to have taken down most of the videos but left the account up. It'll be interesting to see this ideological cyberbattle (between the YouTube terms of service and, well, the Taliban) play out.

Gulliver travels

Here is a letter from an Andrew Sullivan reader.

Critics of non-intervention tend to accuse their opponents of cynicism, cruelty, and brutality, as did your most recent correspondent in his caricature of John Derbyshire. But foreign policy realism is essentially grounded in three deeply conservative concepts: first, we do not really know what makes societies successful, second, we do not know how to make these things happen, and, third, as a result we prefer some kind of stability as opposed to chaos; because conservatives will always prefer the orderly known to the disorderly unknown.

The invasion of Iraq was a profoundly anti-conservative project, since the purpose of the invasion -- aside from disarming Iraq from weapons it did not have -- was a revolutionary project meant to rebuild a nation from scratch. At the time, supporters of the effort pointed to the examples of Germany and Japan after World War Two, ignoring the fact that both nations had evolved into fairly cohesive and democratic market economies well before we showed up. Over time it has been shown that the neoconservative perspective -- which is really a revolutionary perspective -- has failed.

Now the argument is being applied to Afghanistan.

We hold elections, we chase guerillas, we destroy opium crops: we expect the Afghanis to calm down and be nice little democrats. No, that isn't going to work, it never works. The only thing we accomplish by invading other countries is provide an easy target to natives who resent our presence, because as any good conservative knows the easiest way to get someone to hate you is to try to force someone to do something they are not ready to do.

At this point the counter-argument is reduced to a querulous "What do you expect then? That we do nothing?" Well, there is one alternative. In historic times, when states fail, they breed chaos which spills over into other states and causes problems. At that point, the more stable state simply takes over the failed state, either as a protectorate, a colony, or via annexation. (I would point to numerous historical examples but that would offend many nationalists.) We could therefore simply take over any number of Arab or Muslim or otherwise failed states, because it is clearly in our national interest to do so, however, to do so, we would have to abide by strict rules of occupation, and not attempt to force a people to be what they are not yet, and not building settlements on their land, and so on. And our mission should be simply for keeping the peace, nothing more, and nothing less, and reducing the exposure of our people to violence.

The problem is that the United States nor any other country in the developed world is prepared to such a project. Our manpower resources are stretched thin as it is -- don't ask me where we're going to get the troops for Afghanistan -- our financial resources are even thinner, the American people have no interest in national sacrifice in terms of a military draft, increased taxes, rationing, or any of the other associations of a broad national effort, and therefore we have to recognize that the project of colonization or quasi-colonization is simply not going to happen.

However, if that's the case, there's really no more reason for us to be in either Afghanistan OR Iraq, because, again, in terms of history, these things work themselves out on their own scale. The best we can do is support dialog, communication, trade, and other benign forms of interaction. Anything more will simply kill people -- theirs and ours -- and will advance the evolution of these societies not one iota.

I agree with this completely except for one and a half things. First, the half; while I am mostly sure that this reader is using the colonization option as the sort of theoretically possible but realistically unacceptable option I would consider it, it's not a hundred percent clear from his tone or phrasing. So let me say that I would have presented the same alternative, but mostly as a means of showing what a limited set of options we have within the realm of acceptable behavior.

The complete thing is that I am so bloody sick of the notion of societies' "advancing" or evolving in a teleological sense that presupposes a goal that the last sentence of the letter comes awfully close to making me want to throw the whole, otherwise well-put, thing in the bin.

I'm not sure why I seem to have adopted a British lexicon in the previous paragraph--probably because I couldn't think of a more American way of avoiding much worse profanity--but that's all I have to say about that.

Nationalizing an army

Andrew Sullivan highlighted this excerpt from Tom Ricks a few days ago:

Stories like this from the Associated Press drive me nuts. The Afghan army is "hard to train." Why? Because the soldiers are illiterate. Pop quiz: How many of the Spartans at Thermopalye were literate? [...] The average private soldier in Afghanistan does not need to be literate. Nor does he need diversity training, by the way. (FWIW, he probably has a lot more liberated attitude toward gays than does the average Marine recruit.) He only needs the sort of literacy classes described in the AP article if his American trainers lack the imagination and historical knowledge to train him to be an Afghan, instead of an imitation American, soldier. If we are going to make any progress in dealing with failed states, we are going to have to learn to train across cultures.

Thereafter, he received the following reader email:

I'm not sure what the point of your post quoting Tom Ricks was. His arguments that literacy is not a necessary skill for soldiers are ludicrous. He says "the average soldier in Afghanistan does not need to be literate" citing as authority Spartan soldiers at Thermopalye, who were apparently illiterate. However, I doubt that the Spartan soldiers had to operate and repair trucks, tanks, canons [sic] and other mechanized equipment, or do any of the myriad tasks a modern functioning army is supposed to do.

I suppose Ricks believes the Afghan army could do away with intelligence reports, uniform written protocol and procedures, or anything else of the sort. Hell, get rid of maps, since the soldiers don't need to be able read them. It's just ridiculous. I can't tell what basis he has for disputing the Maj. Gen.'s assessment that the literacy rate is an impediment to training the Afghan army other than some romanticized notion of the Spartan soldier, who needed nothing more than a stout heart and a sharp sword to defeat his enemy.

I'm also not sure what Ricks is suggesting with respect to the "diversity training," but if that is his euphamism for training that is supposed to instil a respect for the rights of other ethnic groups and tribes, I don't think it should be dismissed as casually as Ricks does.

I think both sides are overstating the case somewhat when it comes to the necessity or non-necessity of literacy, but that's not actually what interests me here. What interests me is nation-building, which is supposedly what we're doing in Afghanistan (let's ignore the obvious flaws inherent in that strategy for now).

One of the few points of agreement, to my knowledge, in the theory of the rise of nation-states is the importance of national, citizen armies. (Knowing this highly contested literature, it's entirely possible that there's a school of thought that dismisses this factor, but I have never encountered it.) The idea is that the technical and bureaucratic requirements of creating, maintaining, updating, and deploying such a force contribute mightily to the state's growth in terms of capacity, revenue, and control over its territory; and, more important for my purposes here, that the common experiences, training, and contact among citizens from disparate parts of the territory serves an important role in homogenizing them and helping them to identify with the whole nation, rather than a region or ethnic group. In this sense the military's role is comparable to that of nationally standardized education and national newspapers.

So if what we're trying to do is build an Afghani nation to go along with the state bureaucracy we've instituted, then literacy training, diversity training, really just about ANY training that is universal across diverse forces drawn from diverse locations, is in fact vital. Literacy and diversity training are positive things in their own right, in general, but from a particular academic perspective they're not necessarily the point (though there's a strong academic case to be made for literacy as well).

I do wonder--diversity training, while teaching us that we're all equal and so on, can have the effect of reifying and institutionalizing the categories across which we're equal. If we're trying to build a pan-Afghan identity, it might be more effective to have a policy of equal treatment and let experience of enforcement and example from senior officers do the work: after all, I don't think the British army of old spent a lot of time talking about how people from Kent are just as good as people from Liverpool, or whatever, but rather treated them the same--as soldiers. However, this a) is based on my own speculation and b) requires a functioning, standardized, and authoritative military bureaucracy, which Afghanistan decidedly lacks at the moment.

Another important difference here is that, in my understanding, the French and British citizen armies that came into existence at the dawn of those nation-states fought primarily outside the state's existing territory of dominion. This serves two purposes: it provides an operational imperative for soldiers to get along and function the same, no matter their local, ethnic, or sectarian origins, without complicating these questions with interactions with those origins (for example, deployment to those localities, interactions with those ethnicities, etc); and it allows the military to function as a fairly closed system with a homogeneous culture. Afghanistan, while it does have an operational imperative for functioning, uniform soldiers, faces conflicts largely within its borders. This complicates the building of homogeneous loyalties and experiences, and it makes the building of a distinct military culture and experience that can trump or at least influence preceding experience and loyalties much more difficult.

The thing is, as long as we continue to try to instill these principles from outside the organization, it won't work. These things happened in the European nation-states because they were politically and militarily beneficial. Arguably, the reason no comprehensive nation-state system has emerged in Afghanistan so far is that there's no political imperative for it. The processes and incentives just don't seem to be there. Given that, it's hard (for me) to see how this project can ever be successful--but I said I wouldn't get into that.

Regardless, the significance of these kinds of training is based solely neither in the cost to the American taxpayer nor in the operational relevance or irrelevance of their content. Spartan soldiers, after all, were not just trained how to use a sword and that's it; they were trained how to fight in formations, how to fight alongside their fellow soldiers, and they were trained to care what happened to their fellow soldiers and to the fortunes of their city-state. Similarly, while literacy is useful in learning how to operate equipment, it's arguably easier to learn such things through being taught hands-on by someone who already knows. Almost more important, from a nation-building perspective, than the content or use of what one learns in the army is what happens when one leaves the army: one carries a common experience, body of knowledge, and bond home with one, and an army of ones disperses these commonalities throughout the territory. Over time, the effects of this phenomenon contribute a great deal to the formation of a common identity.

Speechless again

Afghan schoolgirls possibly poisoned for daring to try to get an education.


Sometimes there really isn't anything to say.

Just a minute

Add to all my doubts re: Afghanistan the following from the WaPo:

President Obama's new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy will require significantly higher levels of U.S. funding for both countries, with U.S. military expenses in Afghanistan alone, currently about $2 billion a month, increasing by about 60 percent this year.

My mind has been thoroughly boggled. $2 billion a month?!

Let's see. 2 billion times .6 is 1.2 billion. So we're going to be looking at an estimated $3.2 billion a month, and probably we'll go over budget because everything always does.

The world is a strange place. In Washington D.C., particular political coalitions shift, someone gives an order, and huge amounts of economic, industrial, and military substance shift. The sheer scale is incredible, like a great science fiction movie. And yet, probably, nothing much will happen in the aggregate.

Further into Afghanistan

So generally speaking I don't exactly have an opinion on the doubling down in Afghanistan, other than a certainty that it will all end in tears in the short term and only maybe with some kind of unflashy satisfaction in the long term (if we make it to the long term). This certainty is so far in the background it doesn't even seem like an opinion on a policy so much as a fact of life--in my opinion, the exact nature of what we do in Afghanistan in the short term doesn't matter. We're not going to see the results that would make us happy (and for many of us, that happiness would be ambivalent at best) anytime soon, no matter what; long-term, I'm not really sure exactly what we want outside of vague notions of "stability" and misleading (because impossible) rhetoric about poppies, and I don't know enough to think effectively about what we ought to be doing.

All that said, I think Andrew Sullivan is spot-on here:

As long as we can prevent terrorist bases forming that could target the US mainland, I do not see a reason for this kind of human and institutional enmeshment. My fear is that it multiplies our enemies, drags us further into the Pakistan nightmare, and will never Westernize a place like Afghanistan without decades-long imperial engagement. Secondly, I do not believe that Iraq is as stable as some optimists do, and fear that we will not be able to get out as cleanly as the president currently envisages. To be trapped more deeply in both places in a year's time seems Bush-like folly to me.

And here, where he notes that David Brooks has been drinking the Kool-Aid again:

Remember that David was only just warning of Obama taking on too many projects at once. But another expanded war in another distant country against another close-to-undefeatable foe? Bring it on! Everything is too much except empire. That's the American DNA.

Brooks' piece is called "The Winnable War," and it is--I was going to be arch and say, "it is, well, uh, interesting," but actually it is worse than that. By my count, it includes:

1. Basic presentation of Afghanistan as inherently broken and problematic
2.Basic presentation of the U.S. effort there as misdirected, dysfunctional, and largely composed of chickens with their heads cut off who also draw flow charts.
3. The big "BUT WAIT! I'VE BEEN CONVERTED!" followed by:

A. Afghanis are just like us! They want what we want! They "detest the insurgents and root for American success"; they have treated us as "friends, allies, and liberators from the very beginning." Look, I'm not here to make a case for the alien and hostile nature of Afghani culture or anything, I am just very, very wary of generalizing this statement to the whole of Afghanistan. It may well be true of the Afghani individuals a prominent American columnist meets when touring the country in whatever the equivalent of the Green Zone is; I just think if it were true of the whole country, well, things would look very different right now. I mean, the one quote from a Real Live Afghani person is from the defense minister, who has a lot of interests other than veracity in talking this way. I think it must be quite obvious that while any broad statement about what Afghanis are like and what they want is fraught, as it would be of any group, arguing that generally speaking Afghanis are rooting for American success seems heroic to the point of idiocy. Any talk of how we just need to educate them as to our aims and their interests at this juncture to get them on our side--which is the only plausible explanation for how people who want what we want and are rooting for us continue to be at war with us--will cause me to scream. In addition, I find it very, very hard to believe that Afghanis want their country occupied, or that "They think we owe them all this." If I were to generalize about what Afghanis want--and, clearly, I am about to--it seems likely that if most Afghanis feel they are owed anything, it is to be left alone.

B. Happily, we are already far along in the trial-and-error process of trying every possible error before trying maybe something that might work. Goooo Yankee know-how! This is working out so great! And we even figured out what our priorities are (which we are totally correct about this time, guys, don't even worry about it) after only like eight years! Rad!

C. Romanticizing the culture.

This country had decent institutions before the Communist takeover. It hasn’t fallen into chaos, the way Iraq did, because it has a culture of communal discussion and a respect for village elders. The Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.

Remember, at the start of this piece the country was inherently problematic; the interposing litany of American commitment, lessons learned, and high hopes allow the author to now employ the trope of how great Afghani culture is at its heart as a reason for why we, the Americans, will be successful in eradicating particular conditions of Afghanistan (low rates of education, high rates of terrorism and insurgency, the Taliban) which we are, of course, authorized and correct in separating from culture and deeming Bad. (I am also not here to defend the Taliban as nice guys, or to say that the U.S. doesn't have a clear interest in getting rid of them; I just think it's awfully convenient that all the Good bits about Afghanistan are inherently part of the culture and all the Bad bits are temporary ills we are there to dispel.)

And then, of course, D: the Yankee Doodle moment.

I finish this trip still skeptical but also infected by the optimism of the truly impressive people who are working here. And one other thing:

After the trauma in Iraq, it would have been easy for the U.S. to withdraw into exhaustion and realism. Instead, President Obama is doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.

Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.

"Withdraw into...realism"? I know he is referring to the foreign policy philosophy and not simply good sense, but did he even reread that before publishing it?

"Infected" is right.

ETA: Larison seems to have come to much the same conclusion.

The stimulus as it stands, and some news from Afghanistan

Marc Ambinder has "the latest summary from the House Appropriations Committee" of the stimulus bill.

The New York times informs me that Congress has (publicly) learned what we already knew: Karzai not working out so good. For some details on Afghanistan, see here, and here, and on the spreading of extreme Islamism around Pakistan outside of FATA (that's the semi-autonomous tribal region bordering Afghanistan that we're always fretting about), see here.

I could very easily go find like fifty more links to throw up here, but I feel rather ill and am going to go lie down with The Culture of Sectarianism. So there.

Sounds good in theory, but...

I actually kind of think this is a brilliant idea in a perfect fairy world:

Opiate painkilling drugs are in critically short supply across the developing world. So why doesn't the USA just buy the Afghan poppy harvest, process it into painkilling meds, and distribute them to poor countries?

1. This would cut off the Taliban's chief source of funding.

2. It would put the average Afghan farmer on the side of the US-supported government instead of the Taliban.

3. It would play to our strength -- money. The Taliban has more local knowledge, more time, more patience, more willingess to shed innocent blood. But we have more money. They might be able to outfight us, out-corrupt us, or out-terrorize us, but they can't outbid us.

4. It would put the US on record as alleviating suffering all over the world.

5. By fighting the Taliban with dollars instead of (as many) soldiers, we'd suffer a lot fewer killed and maimed Americans.

6. It might even be cheaper. Soldiers, tanks, planes, humvees, night vision goggles, bullets, Predator drones, etc. are really, really, expensive.

The brilliant thing about this is that it doesn't require Afghani farmers, who really don't need any extra trouble, to change anything about their farming practices; it provides a market for their product that doesn't fund the Taliban or lead to horrific human rights abuses within the structure of the transaction; it's a badly needed source of revenue.

However, it's clearly not that simple. First of all, you can't just buy the opium crop and remove--or even significantly reduce--the army. You need both. If the Taliban can't rely on opium revenues, in the absence of obstruction they'll just find another way to force the population to support them. Not everyone in Afghanistan is a poppy farmer, by a long shot, and clearly the Taliban have managed them before. By the same token, Afghani poppy farmers don't sell to Taliban-connected drug lords because they pay the highest--it's because these guys have incredibly harsh protection rackets going. This is a frequent reason girls set themselves on fire at a young age--sometimes their fathers can't deliver what they need to or they find themselves "owing" a drug lord in some way, and they end up giving them their daughters in payment.

If a higher bidder just comes along, the farmers aren't going to merrily switch business partners hey presto. They would need significant protection from retribution. So, yes, you need both security forces and poppy-buying. Keeping in mind that our forces there are already deemed insufficient, I don't think we could really draw down much (although if we get out of Iraq and had poppy revenue, our presence there would be less of a strain--for the budget and for the soldiers themselves, who hopefully could go on fewer and shorter tours of duty).

The other massive problem is the likelihood that a number of soldiers would suddenly turn into drug dealers. Let's face it, our armed forces have been taking whoever they can get lately (except gay people), including convicted felons, abusers, rapists, etc. (This is not to say that all soldiers are in this mold--far from it.) It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that if you get a bunch of burned-out Marines and whatnot together in a war zone and give them a bunch of opium, they'll either start taking it or, in a region riddled with connections, start dealing it. Or, that time-honored combination, both. Really, the last thing we need is the U.S. Armed Forces basically acting as the best, most secure drug convoy in the world.

Imagine the possibilities. The opiates have to get all the way from Afghanistan to somewhere where they can be made into something useful, probably in the West, and they'll change hands several times. Then, once they're drugs--drugs which can still get you high--they have to get all the way to Sub-Saharan Africa or similar. The second stage is no more risky than humanitarian medical aid already is. But oh, god, I can see the reports coming in now and they're not pretty. The second a U.S. soldier kills someone over drugs we are screwed. Plus, once the VA has to start implementing detox programs for soldiers coming home whose families are freaked out by their withdrawal symptoms, the Armed Forces start to look pretty damn bad--especially to parts of the population who have historically had strong respect and support for the military. I mean, if anything says THE OPPOSITE OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE AND HONOR in big red letters, it's a smack problem.

So I guess my point is that the above proposal is an admirable solution to several real-world issues that have been bungled or not addressed up to now; it just ignores a whole host of other real-world issues that would accompany it. That's the thing with policy: it always does a million things other than the things you designed it to do.

When it rains, it pours

There was a car bomb in Peshawar. (Peshawar being the capital of the FATA, or the tribal areas that are causing the U.S. so much trouble right now.)

So far 21 dead, 90+ injured. The electricity also went out and there were fires that destroyed a number of shops and warehouses due to an explosion in a nearby gas line.

Of course, everybody thinks this is India or Indians getting back at Pakistan for Mumbai, even though nobody actually knows whether Pakistan is responsible in the first place.

I would not be too surprised if this were the same group making sure they get what they want, which is conflict between India and Pakistan; or if it were unrelated (after all, this is the FATA, and there have been a lot of bombings and violence around there lately) and it's impossible for people not to construe it as a part of this narrative. After all, Peshawar is hardly analogous to Mumbai. While it is a center of arts and culture, something it shares with Mumbai, it's not the financial or economic center of Pakistan the way Mumbai is of India. It doesn't strike at the same pressure point.

A bomb in Peshawar makes much more sense in the context of the American war on terror than it does in the context of whatever chess game someone is playing with India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. (Unless, of course, we count this chess game as part of a larger one that has to do with Afghanistan, which seems eminently possible to me, although its similarity to a 24 plot makes me suspicious. Then again I continue to be no kind of expert or authority.)

One thing leads to another

Daniel Larison says, Stupid Policies Have Consequences. How our ill-advised NATO goals have made our lives harder in Afghanistan.

Tragedy large and small

The Taliban shot and killed an Afghani senior policewoman on her way to work in a drive-by.

I don't really know what to say about this without making it about ME ME ME, so I won't. I just ask that you take a moment to remember Malalai Kakar.

In among the sweeping geopolitical analyses and the totalizing numbers, we tend to forget the people involved.

This is about child marriage in Yemen.

And when I say "child," I mean "girl," of course, because strangely enough this only ever seems to happen to female children.


In Yemen, girls are often married as young as 8 or 9. Sometimes it's because their families can't support them, sometimes it's because their families are afraid they'll be kidnapped and forcibly married by someone else (the article just sort of mentions this offhand, but WHAT THE FUCK), but largely because, as the article says, the fight against Communism in South Yemen (back when Yemen was divided) was won with its replacement with fundamentalist Islam. Just like, oh, Afghanistan. What was that about containment again? Boy, the Cold War sure was great, huh? (More on this later).

When Yemen was still divided, there was a law in the South saying that girls could not marry before age 16, boys not before 18. Since reunification and the rise of hardline Islamism (I have no idea if that's how, say, President Bush would use the word, but I know what I mean by it--again, more on that later [I decided this was too long and I'd save it for another time]), the law was revised to say that girls could get married whenever so long as they didn't move in with their husbands till age 15. Right. Fat chance.

The article was spurred by the fact that Nujood, a ten-year-old girl, ran out of her husband's owner's house, hailed herself a taxi (in rural Yemen? Nobody explained how this was possible), and went to the courthouse. It was the first time she had ever traveled anywhere by herself. The judge granted her a permanent divorce--she was lucky enough to find a sympathetic judge, rather than one who would have disregarded her and had her husband or father stand for her in court, which would no doubt had left her still "married" (I refuse to dignify this situation with that term).

Now she wants to be a human rights lawyer like the one who took her case, or maybe a journalist.

It just breaks my heart. When I read that last bit I could just hear a little ten-year-old girl's voice saying, "When I grow up..." and it's so terrible. Neither she nor the other girl profiled in this article had ever even been told what sex WAS before they were repeatedly raped and beaten before even reaching puberty. Yemen has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (Afghanistan's still worse, though), because girls are having massive numbers of children before they're physically ready.

When challenged, conservative Yemenis defend the practice as traditional, etc (there's even a proverb about how an 8 year old bride guarantees a great marriage) and point out that the Prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old. Now, from what I understand (although no one can really know), he married her for political reasons, not for domestic servitude or sex, and he did not use her as such. It would definitely be an incredible act of hypocrisy to preach what he did about marriage and women and then do such a thing. (Such acts have, of course, been seen, but rarely have they taken place among successful prophets to my knowledge.) He seems by many accounts to have been pretty much devoted to his first and primary wife.

All that aside, there are three two [same as above: got too long] things I want to discuss here.

1: I know you have all heard it before, but it cannot be repeated enough and it would be a disservice to omit it: women and girls are little better than property in places like these. They are domestic slaves. Rural Afghan men usually take a second wife when their first is too physically worn out to work the fields, haul water, grind flour, etc. day in and day out, let alone have more children. The first wife will stay in the house, take care of babies, and do some cooking and cleaning while the new, strong, young wife (anywhere from 8-18 or so) does these incredibly arduous chores--alone, or with other women in the family. The men hunt for prestige and chat with each other. Opium farmers marry off their daughters to pay off debt, for Christ's sake.

And if you think there is no relationship between that sort of thing, honor killings, etc. and the way women are framed as objects, prizes, and/or babymakers here in this country (amazing, isn't it, how starlets change overnight from WYLD PARTY GRRL to Loving!Mother! as soon as they show a bump), then in some sense I envy you because your life is a lot less depressing than mine.


2: I want to discuss the relationship to the Cold War. The containment policy has been repeatedly cited as a model of international policy that combined force with diplomacy, caution/restraint with courage, and pragmatism with principle. This is all true, and our lame duck president et.al. could have learned a lot from the practitioners of containment.

However, the fundamental flaw in containment and, in fact, in every bloody thing the glorious "West" has done since we first figured out we could take brown people's land, is underestimating or misunderstanding the people we are trying to manipulate.

The people fighting the Cold War didn't think it mattered who replaced the Communists when they got rid of them. This was because rather than seeing the Yemenis, or the Afghanis, etc. as people with a grievance in need of an outlet, a hope, and a strategy, they saw them as brainwashed pawns of Stalin and Mao. (There was a doctrine whose name I forget that promoted international development because poverty was the best seeding ground for Marxism, but even that--while on the right track--had a paternalistic overtone). And they figured once that brainwashing was dealt with, they would go back to being powerless, harmless, dumb-ass little brown people.

Only it doesn't work like that. Inequity among nations continued to grow, the people were no less poor and hopeless than they were before, and fundamentalist Islam took root in the wake of Communism--in part as a backlash to some of the Communist ideology (atheism, gender equality, sexual freedom, and so on). And guess what? Different name, same problem, they're still pissed at us and they still know how to shoot.

I just think it's incredible how little it is discussed in the public discourse the degree to which we have created our own problems. The West colonized. The West fought wars that it couldn't quite win (I'm talking about the British way back when, not us now) and left chaos. The West drew borders to fit its own interests, never stopping to think how those borders might affect the situation on the ground and how that, in turn, might cause it problems. And the West (with the U.S. having taken over from Britain) continues to strut around like everybody's cocky big brother who you're just itching to punch.

Yet we talk about "radical Islam" and terrorism and this and that like they're endemic. Like they just grew out of the ground without any help.

Someone on Shakesville once discussed the U.S.'s profound lack of a sense of history. I think it's very deeply tied to our political cycle ("What? That wasn't me, that was the other guy! Clean slate!") as well as to our constant conviction that we can create ourselves, as exemplified in the American dream, the lucky break, the second chance, etc. Our pasts do not have to define us, so our mythology goes.

It's a wonderful attitude, but sometimes it's just not workable. In the case of the Middle East, it's plain stupid.