|
by afew
I'm writing this in response to The3rdColumn who wanted to know my solution to the "Afghanistan problem", and told me:
If you don't know the "Afghanistan problem" yet after everything that's been written about it and NATO's involvement in Afghanistan, I'm afraid no definition can help. So here goes: I don't know what the Afghanistan problem is. I can see, not one, but several. If I were Afghan, I would probably see more, or at least I would see things differently. Afghan or European, I might think (as The3rdColumn her/himself did) of the problem of opium production. But, among the possibilities, there are three "Afghanistan problems" that stand out for me.
Afghanistan is a mountainous country inhabited by warrior tribes. Invading armies have never found it easy to subdue, or above all to maintain control of. In the more recent invasions, the British faced off with the Russians (this was in the nineteenth century) in the Great Game, an imperialist conflict fought over several episodes, in which the British lost an army to the Afghan tribes before finally pulling out, dispirited, in 1919. The Soviet Union invaded and poured huge forces into conquering and holding Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, before pulling out defeated. The current invasion, originally American, with a side order of NATO since 2003, follows a similar pattern. A strong initial show of force gained the allegiance of a sufficient number of powerful war lords; Kabul was taken; the tribes not allied to the invaders cleared out for a time into the mountains, then began a gradually increasing guerrilla and won back lost ground. You can win Kabul, but you can't win all of the territory all of the time; conventional forces are at a disadvantage against the warrior tribes that are at home on their terrain; air superiority is insufficient to tip the balance. Putting in increased military force is always the temptation for the invader. History indicates that it is unlikely to be successful. The end of the story is, the invader pulls out of Kabul and a new set of tribal alliances takes over the country. So for this "Afghanistan problem", that of a country that has a tradition of rebellion against and defeat of an invader, the solution doesn't seem to lie in massive use of force.
What went before is cold talk of history and strategy, you may say. And human suffering? The women and children forced to live under brutal patriarchal domination, unless we offer them something better, an open door to a different life? Yes. I saw the other day a documentary about an Afghan girl of eight taken from school and forced to go to live with her husband in an arranged marriage. Yes, girls are widely denied schooling and women are shackled into traditional roles, even in Kabul. Yes, there are NGOs doing excellent work in health and education. No, I don't want that to stop. But another documentary I saw, not long after the Soviets pulled out, showed a snippet of a talk with a boy of about twelve whose father had been killed in the fighting, and who was working 10-12 hours a day to keep the family alive. "Don't you want to go to school?" he was asked. "I'm too tired after work. I just want to sleep." "So you don't want to study, then?" "I do..." <lowers his head and begins to cry> "Why are you crying?" "I'm not crying, my heart is..." "But why?" "I'm so weak... So weak..." To be so disillusioned with oneself, so despairing, at the age of twelve -- his voice and look as he said that is not something I'm going to forget. The Soviet invasion made an orphan of that boy and ruined his family. War itself is a source of oppression and trauma. Of course we rightly feel indignant about human suffering, and the urge to get in there and set things straight is strong. Over the last half-century, as humanitarian causes and NGOs have gone global, from Bangla Desh and Médecins Sans Frontières through Band-Aid, debate has risen, often bitter, over the right to intervention by force. The more radical exponents of this supposed right (Bernard Kouchner for example, one of MSF's founders and now French Foreign Minister) almost join hands with the neocons in the acceptation of the use of force to spread human rights and democracy. But, (quite apart from the question of where intervention is justified and where it isn't, among the many candidates around the globe), the problem is that it doesn't work. Force will not bring about deep changes in culture (see the Red Army and Mao's Cultural Revolution for examples). You don't spread democracy and the rule of law by the edge of the sword. Is there a single example in history where these have resulted from invasion, warfare, and bloodshed? (And no, history is not over: Fukuyama was just blowing another cloud of the smoke that serves to cover the nakedness of imperialist influence- and resource-grabbing.) To this heart-breaking Afghanistan problem, I see no way forward in multiplying the horrors and trauma of war.
Immediately after 9/11, NATO invoked Article V of its founding document, the Washington Treaty, according to which:
an armed attack against one or several members shall be considered as an attack against all But that was forgetting a far more fundamental, unspoken rule of NATO, which is that it belongs to the USA. The real command flow is from US down, and in this case, NATO members were moving faster than the Bush administration wished. What was about to be projected to shock and awe the world was American strike power. NATO had to put its noble Article V away, and Operation Enduring Freedom, the main thrust of which was the invasion of Afghanistan, was entirely American-commanded (even if small allied contingents, organised as the ISAF - International Security Assistance Force - were given, as the name indicates, security tasks in and around Kabul). With the help of the Northern Alliance, Enduring Freedom quickly took over the country as the enemy predictably headed for the southern mountain fastnesses, but there, Enduring Freedom failed to adapt to mountain guerrilla tactics in order to get Osama bin Laden and clean out the al-Qaeda leadership. America's focus, anyway, was on Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11. In the switch to that invasion NATO was called on to take command of ISAF. ISAF's numbers and "security" tasks gradually expanded. Meanwhile, predictably (see above), the Taleban-led southern tribes stepped up the guerrilla. By 2006, the pressure was on NATO: more troops had to be committed, and not for the original stability and reconstruction tasks, but for counter-insurgency in the south. The same pressure is seeing a surge again now. There is no doubt about who piles on the pressure, it's the US, and this is my point. NATO has done Washington's bidding throughout: stay out! come in! lead "nation-building" (America doesn't do that)! take command! raise troop numbers! switch assignments to counter-insurgency! raise troop numbers... This is the old Cold War alliance used as a US surrogate in quite different conflicts, in fact turf and resource wars, way outside of its original North Atlantic territory. European countries should not accept this vassal status but should look to building their own common defence organisation -- which should not, in any case, be pointed towards territorial domination abroad. Pouring in more troops won't work anyway. What hope is there against the Pashtun tribes based in the mountains and across the entirely notional border with the Pakistani province of Waziristan? Pakistan being, uh, a US ally... Logically it would be necessary to put as many troops into Pakistan to harass the Taleban from that side, but that would mean an "explosive" Pakistani uprising with unpredictable results. And still the odds would be on a guerrilla victory. So to this Afghanistan problem, the only solution I see is an orderly NATO withdrawal now, rather than an ignominious retreat later. If the US breaks its NATO toy as a result, too bad.
So I see no solution to these "Afghanistan problems" in doing the bidding of the US military-industrial-diplomatic establishment and raising the war stakes. That will mean the return of the Taleban and the descent of a veil of obscurantism and oppression on the Afghani people? Perhaps, but how obscurantist and oppressive are the Northern Alliance tribes? And how hubristic are we to believe we can change things by shedding blood and blowing things up?
And when do we attack Saudi Arabia anyway? |
Menu
. Home
. About . Contact . New User Guide . FAQ . Search . Search (Google) . Archives (Wiki) Art, Economics, Energy, Environment, EU Politics, Mech & Tech, By Country Login
|
||||||
|
The "Afghanistan Problem" | 79 comments (79 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
| ||||||||
