The erratic behavior in recent days of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has raised new doubts in many quarters about our expanding involvement in that country. But new doubts aren’t really necessary to reach the commonsense conclusion that it’s crazy for us to be there in any significant way, and to see that this is the quagmire of quagmires of U.S. foreign policy follies.
For me, one brief but incredibly poignant report on the evening news awhile back perfectly summed up this view. It showed a young American officer, all of about 25 or 26, speaking to a group of Afghan village elders. He was standing and addressing them through an interpreter. They were seated cross-legged and staring upward. He wore a crisp, freshly laundered uniform and exuded youthful confidence. They wore traditional tribal garb, dusty from their surroundings, and appeared honestly trying to fathom what this American officer was talking about.
Physically this officer and his listeners were just a few feet apart. In terms of true comprehension, however, in terms of shared goals and the means to reach these goals, in terms of the basic premises on which these parties had built their lives, officer and Afghan listeners were coming from spaces separated by millenia of distinctly different cultural evolution.
When we confronted Nazism and Communism in the last century, we confronted belief structures that Americans and other Westerners generally understood quite well. Socialist and racist philosophies were very widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth centuries. In their most exaggerated and perverted forms in the mid-twentieth century, they became Communism and Nazism.
Detestable intellectual and behavioral end products? Of course. But we understood where their true believers were coming from, the bases of their beliefs, what they hoped to achieve, enabling us to ultimately combat them successfully not only militarily but ideologically.
A comparable success in Afghanistan? Nation building in that land of valley- and tribal-based societies? Democracy in any form that’s compatible with our own democratic institutions? A market-based rather than a bazaar-based economy? Nonsense, utter nonsense.
The only sane and sensible legacy the U.S. should seek to leave behind in Afghanistan is an absolute understanding among the Taliban and Afghans generally that if they promote attacks on our own homeland, we will unleash a reign of shock and awe upon them, and perhaps most effective, a reign of opium-destroying herbicides, that will make their lives far, far less pleasant.
We came. We bombed. Now it’s time to leave. Done right, the local mullahs might well declare victory over the invaders. But they will be very, very disinclined to cross these invaders (us) ever again.