On Afghanistan
Welcome back!
This, the second ever edition of “Mind Scourge,” focuses on Afghanistan, and America’s ongoing military presence - now in its eighteenth year - in that much-contested nation. It would do us much good to dwell on the significance of this particular number: a full generation, the period during which a child comes of age. U.S. forces, in some instances, are now fighting amongst the Taliban, the Taliban’s compatriot Haqqani wing, and the Khorasan Province affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, people who were not yet born when the Islamic Emirate, the Taliban proto-state, was ensconced in Kabul, the Afghan capital. If this does not encapsulate, in and of itself, an indictment of U.S. policy in Afghanistan since the trauma of September 11, 2001, then I am unaware of what would.
To this end, I have reviewed the superb Taliban: The Unknown Enemy, by James Fergusson. The Taliban are little understood in the West. Fergusson’s book is not perfect, but America should know its enemies, if only the better to defeat them. If we had, perhaps we might have avoided many of the mistakes we made.
Piers Brendon in The Dark Valley remarked, in passing, that La Guardia, three-term Republican mayor of New York City, was so cosmopolitan he was in fact parochial. This could equally be applied more broadly to the American character itself. It is part of the greatness of America, that anyone, from any circumstances, and of any creed, nationality, or ethnic background, can be as equally American as anyone who traces her ancestry back to the signatories of the Mayflower Compact itself. Birthright citizenship, unusual globally, is reflective of this. The universal acid that is America dissolves all other identities within itself. An all-encompassing ideology, it admits no alternatives. Evangelical in its makeup, it seeks converts.
The last connects powerfully with James Ferguson’s Taliban: The Unknown Enemy. The post-9/11 occupation is not the first American (or Anglo) encounter with Afghanistan. Josiah Ghor, abolitionist, adventurer, ex-communicant Quaker, latter-day Alexander, and one-time Prince of Ghor, is the likely inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s 1888 The Man Who Would Be King, raised an American flag in the Hindu Kush, and led an army of Hazaras under Dost Muhammad’s standard in the 1830’s. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) ended with the destruction of Elphinstone’s army at the hands of the Pashtun; the Second (1878-1880) ended with the ceding of certain tribal areas to British India and is the basis of the Durand Line Agreement dividing Afghanistan from India, a boundary claim latter inherited by Pakistan, a perennial font of contention between Kabul and Islamabad; the Third (1919) ended with Afghanistan’s recovery of its authority over foreign policy (previously authored by Great Britain). In the Cold War, the U.S. exported the New Deal development model of the Tennessee Valley Authority to Helmand, building roads, canals, dams, and entire towns as the Afghanistan facet of a broader program of international aid today encapsulated by the portentous double-barreled appellation “Green Revolution.” With the Soviet invasion of 1979 the project was wrapped up; when the United States returned to Afghanistan at the beginning of the 21st century, this time in force, some of the same workers, a generation older, did as well, this time in the baggage train.
What is striking about this capsule history is the extent to which it is so little known in the U.S. I was struck reading, in the fall of 2001, a political cartoon of two men, both in turban and shalwar qamiz, squat around a fire outside the entrance to a cave, roasting spitted meat. The one remarks that he had heard the Americans were planning to “bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” The other, mordantly, responds that “finally there will be some progress.” The joke’s conceit is that Afghanistan is a timeless place, where nothing ever changes. A Cold War cockpit, a launching pad for al-Qaeda, a tabula rasa for outsiders to inscribe their particular designs, whether communism, Islamism, or, in the case of the United States, free market democracy: that is Afghanistan. It is a place to which history happens, not the kind of place that makes it.
That Afghanistan in fact has its own indigenous debate on development and modernity seems to have escaped virtually everyone, especially the U.S. foreign policy community and international development experts. The state-building of Abdur Rahman, the modernizing reforms of Amanullah, Nadir Shah’s dirigisme, the campus politics of communists and Islamists in the 1960’s: all of this is so much chaff for the wind. Foreign intaglio on Afghan substrate is the preferred analytical mode in Western capitals.
In truth, the crux of the Afghan dilemma is not its isolation from “modernity” (that emotive but overdetermined concept) but instead its experience with an all-too concentrated distillation of it. It is worth underlining that Afghanistan was never colonized. Instead, it served as conduit for competing imperialisms in Central Asia, first Russian, then Soviet, also British, finally American. Afghanistan retained the luxury of choice. That accomplishment, and it is significant, places Afghanistan in a small category of states, alongside Iran, Turkey, and Japan, that were never colonized, but outside Afghanistan this fact is never remarked upon.
What we see in Afghanistan, therefore, is the full spectrum of twentieth-century political debate unfold. Conservatism and liberalism; the agency of the individual versus obligations owed to the clan and the community; communism, Islamism, and democracy; urban vs. rural; entrepreneurialism and state dirigiste; centralization or devolution to a “republic of villages”; the constitutional role of religion: Afghanistan has evolved debates on all these themes. What astonishes in Afghanistan is not its atavism but the sheer diversity of its political thought.
In Afghanistan, basic questions remain undecided. This is the fundamental driver of political violence in the state. Axioms can only be asserted, never proven. They can be defended by a consilience of evidence relative to a given historical context, but this is argument by words, not proof. In politics, unlike in economics, there is no universal yardstick to measure success and failure. In politics, unlike economics, people disagree on the questions themselves, let alone the answers. In contexts where proof is impossible, the deus ex machina of violence, the ultima ratio regumof political actors, emerges. Incidentally, this is why there is no “end to history” – with history being defined as these basic axioms underpinning the way human beings, that ultimate social species, interrelate to one another. The nature and meaning of the sovereign is history’s Entscheidungsproblem.
Ferguson makes clear, as did Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Little America, that the United States failed to understand the nature of the war it was fighting, and that this was product of the failure to properly conceptualize Afghan society itself. This brings us full circle to the opening paragraph of this review. The greatness of America, its promise of universal citizenship to any individual of any background, leads many Americans, and especially American politicians, who typically exhibit an exaggerated and under-examined form of this national characteristic, to believe that all peoples, wherever they may be, and at whatever time, are essentially Americans. Scratch beneath the surface, and the inner Jefferson springs free. The implication of this is that other lifeways are destined for history’s ash heap, and none too soon. John Locke once argued that “in the beginning all the world was America;” by involution, all will be America again. This central mistake is the reef on which U.S. foreign policy post-9/11 foundered.
In foreign policy, as in war, you must always know the ground on which you fight. World War II, that essential reference point for any intervention overseas today (every opponent must be a Hitler), was at its core a problem of geopolitics: change the regime and you solved the problem. This is the same logic that George Kennan applied to the Soviet Union. But not all problems are of this type. There are also problems of peoples. The Arab-Israeli conflict is fundamentally a conflict of peoples, not regimes; this is why there is at best a cold peace between Egypt and Jordan, even though Israel has peace treaties with both decades old. The U.S. conceit was that the problem was geopolitical: to be solved in negotiations between capitals. This is the same thinking that concludes ousting Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein is equivalent to victory. In both cases, the U.S. did not understand the real battlefield. When the disagreement is over axioms, not policies, the only winning move is not to play.
Book Recommendations: Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror, by Barnett Rubin; Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, by William Dalrymple.
Article: “Behind the Lines,” by Shane Bauer. An extraordinary long read about a journalist writing for Mother Jones about his visit to Syria.
Blog: https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com, written by Martin Gurri. If you don’t know Martin Gurri, you should. His book Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium isn’t always convincing, but is by far the best version of its thesis. Even if we don’t live in Gurri’s world, the current moment is some aspect of it.