I am truly torn on the question of Afghanistan. I want to believe we can move troops in and make life better for the people of Afghanistan. I want to believe we can put our mind and our hands to work for them, and make the world a better and more peaceful place.
I am ladened with a classic case ofwhite man's burden.
Below I'm going to walk through my emotional response to the Afghan war, what I've learned about myself as I untangled those emotional responses from a more pragmatic view, and why I've come to conclude that ultimately we need to leave Afghanistan ASAP.
When we invaded Afghanistan I could clearly see both the need for, and the justice of, the invasion. We had been attacked, it was then left to us to counterattack and end the threat. The Taliban may not have had much to do with supporting Bin Laden directly (more likely the financial support went the other way) but they shielded them from capture and prosecution. Therefore we had to enter Afghanistan in force, capture Bin Laden, and leave.
Lo' and behold, Bush invaded with a scant 1000 troops, a clean penetration and extraction kind of deal right? Well, no, Bush had to fuck everything he touched up, so he decided to let Bin Laden escape, and stick around for the quagmire.
Okay, I said, well, we have an outstanding debt to the Afghan people. Let's make good on the schools, fig trees, and infrastructure we helped destroy when we backed the Mujahadeen against the Russians.
No, we didn't do that either.
Instead we stayed and made everything worse: we bombed bridges, we blew up mountain roads, we burned our bridges with the civilians, and in an act of true genius -- we allowed a new opium empire to be built under our protection, controlled by many of the political leaders we helped elect.
But, I said to myself, once Bush is gone Obama will FIX IT!
I wanted to succeed in going into a nation ravaged by the cold war and undoing the harm. I wanted to restore the fields of fig and olive trees that I'd read were the historical export of Afghanistan. I wanted to see us build schools and send 100 dollar laptops and technology infrastructure into the mountains to allow the children there to grow up a part of the world beyond the next mountain pass. I wanted to see America succeed again in our great experiment after WWII in nation building.
I am, first and foremost, a believer in economic advancement over warfare as a method for fighting the "war on terror." Jobs cure many ills. Jobs can create access to information and educational resources for your children. With work you can raise a family which provides you an anchor in society and helps you see a place for yourself in the world. A Job keeps you busy, which helps shrink your world down to a manageable space around yourself -- the unemployed have time to worry about sleeveless women working on U.S. bases in the holy land, the employed have something better to do.
Yet, to make jobs there must be an economy worthy of the name. For decades the United States helped suppress the economy of Afghanistan, in an attempt to punish them for their civil rights abuses, for supporting terror attacks, for in fact being run by a group the U.S. considered a terrorist threat.
Rather than fulfilling our promise to rebuild Afghanistan after the Russians retreated, we ignored them, then we penalized them.
That is why I want to say the United States can stay in Afghanistan and somehow fix this problem. I feel that we carry a specific debt, we have harmed the people of Afghanistan, and we need to do right by them before we can go.
But there is one problem - they don't seem to want us there. Not only that, we don't seem terribly interested in building roads and power lines. We're so absorbed in controlling the population that we ignore the most vital elements of civilization -- clean water, sufficient supplies of food, and proper sanitation.
We talk about nation building, as if its all about suppressing the population with Counter Insurgency operations, and holding elections. We forget that our great successes after WWII, in Germany and Japan. There we dealt with homogenous populations (all the same ethnic and cultural group), we empowered them early and throughout much of the rebuilding. We never doubted that both nations were "real" nations. We signed treaties with them to end war, we treated them as peers (albeit defeated peers from whom much would be demanded and on whom many restrictions would be imposed) and their people as responsible for the acts of their nation.
Can the same be said for Afghanistan?
I don't think we can. I do not believe we ever demanded the surrender of the Afghan people. I believe that the Bush administration's decision to attack the government, to treat the leadership as a separate class of persons who could simply be clipped off the top of the Afghan nation, was our first great insult to the Afghanis. It was also a tactical failure -- they have not surrendered to us. They have not, as a people, ceded to us the right to be there. Of course, who could have surrendered but the Taliban, and we took them away. Now Karzai could surrender to us, but we have installed him (through elections to be sure, but he is still a product of our presence).
Moreover, I don't think it is clear that we can call the Afghanis a nation in the same sense that Japan was a nation after World War II. Before the WWII Japan was one unified state, beholden to one central authority. After the war Japan was one unified state, beholden to a new centralized authority.
Before the war in Afghanistan, Afghanistan was many tribal fiefdoms ruled by strong men and mercenary lords who in turn were loosely beholden to a centralized government -- except where they weren't, in the places where the strong men and the mercenary lords were opposed to the Taliban (the northern alliance for example). Here, it appears that little has changed.
That is to say, nation building doesn't change the underlying structures of the society, it just reshapes the levers of government. Counter Insurgency methods might let us reshape the underlying culture, over several generations, if we committed the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary to pull off a true COIN Op strategy like we used in Japan and Germany.
But what does that get us in a world where we can reach out and kill any group of militants dumb enough to come within sight of a robotic bomber. How do we build an economy where all of our investments must be viewed by some element of the culture as war by other means because we are actively engaged in a hot war with them elsewhere?
How much of my desire to stay and "fix" Afghanistan is a 21st century rephrasing of the White Man's Burden?
Too much I think.
It's time to go.
We cannot succeed at anything meaningful in Afghanistan. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we leave, the sooner we can turn around and pour capital investments back into Afghanistan.
I just pray that we have the wisdom to accept this before we lose any more men and women on both sides of the conflict.