(This was originally going to be a response to Ben's post, but I decided to just make it a full blown post to itself.)
Well first, let me say that I would quickly and wholeheartedly disagree with anyone who told me that the war in Afghanistan, at least as it was purportedly waged in 2001, is "immoral" on the scale of Iraq. The government lied about WMDs in Iraq and Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda as a pretense for declaring war. They did not lie about Osama bin Laden being the head of a terrorist organization which flew planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and attempted to fly a fourth into the White House, killing thousands of American citizens. At the time, Osama bin Ladne was in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban government.
An Afghani organization killed a large number of American citizens. That is a damn good reason to start a war in Afghanistan, if there ever was a damn good reason.
As for Juan Cole, I'm always skeptical of people who start by saying things like "character of the country" and "we are dealing with a tribal society." When I read that, I usually assume that the person talking is a politico who is using poorly-understood buzzwords from anthropology and sociology to sound smart. Though it is true that Afghanistan's population tends to be organized along kinship- and locality-based lines, that does not mean it is futile to have a central government. Just because the mujahideen kicked out the Soviets in the 80's doesn't mean Afghanistan "doesn't want" to have a central government - to say so is saying that there's no difference between the US and the USSR, which is frankly insane. Perhaps most Afghanis don't want a central government that will get all in their grill and tell them how to live, which is what the USSR would have done, but that is not the same as not wanting, or at least not being willing to tolerate, a central government.
Let's get back to my first point. If you'll grant me that getting rid of the Taliban is a noble goal on the part of the US, then a central government can be a good thing. If Afghanistan remains "tribal," by which I mean lacking a central government and organized in the same way it was when the Taliban was in (more complete) power, it will continue to be very easy for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or whoever the hell else wants to drum up support for themselves. We saw this in Africa and South America when Europeans walked in and offered local leaders guns in exchange for slaves and mining rights. For fucks sake, we saw this in Afghanistan, six or seven years ago.
A central government doesn't necessarily interfere with local leaders and such. Why can't a central government can be more "hands-off" than that? Instead of rounding up all the Afghanis, shoving them in high-rise apartments and suburbian homes, and strapping them to easy chairs in front of non-stop episodes of Cougartown and Sex Addict,* which is what I assume Cole means when he says "drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming" into the modern world, a central government could simply concern itself with keeping things like Al Qaeda out of the country. For fucks sake, and I use the phrase again for the sake of symmetry, isn't that what the Taliban did, when they were the government? Cole is saying that the Taliban prevented a tribal Afghanistan from becoming communist. What was Taliban, if not a government? An "American" government could prevent a tribal Afghanistan from becoming terrorist! The way I see it, at least, you can't have it one way and not the other!
And I guess this all comes down to whether or not you think it's right for the United States to try to prevent baddies who don't like them to go around making more baddies who don't like them. It's not a completely crazy stance to say that isn't right (my earlier point was that it's crazy to call Afghanistan immoral in the same vein as Iraq), but I would say, given that the baddies killed American citizens, it's a pretty good idea.
* Yes, there is now a show called Sex Addict.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Well, while I think most of this argument is really interesting and novel, I have a couple of problems:
ReplyDelete1. Part of the problem with establishing a central government is that a sovereign state must have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders. If it can't control who uses force, it can't control who uses force against it. Even after the war with the Soviets, the Taliban didn't really have this, and I think you'd be hard pressed to pick out a point in time in Afghani history when such a condition ever existed. If we set our sights on something that has no precedent, even if we imagine it to be aiming low (a stripped down central government rather than a full-blown civil bureaucracy), we still have our work cut out for us.
2. Keeping terrorism out of Afghanistan is a lot different than keep communism out. Communism came with a lot of institutional and ideological fanfare; it had grand ideas that involved reshaping or trying to reshape the lives of Afghani people. Terrorists don't need that, really: all they need is a remote part of the country where the state is weak or absent. So while the Taliban was successful in keeping communism out (something that involved a lot of American support to succeed), I don't think you can offer this as proof that a similarly trimmed down government entity could keep terrorists out.
I think it's pretty obvious from my previous post that I was simply trying to make the point that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the Bush Administration in concert with AIPAC. So your argument is flawed from the start.
ReplyDeleteBut on a less anti-Semitic note, you're obviously right that the justifications for the respective invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are incomparable. There isn't an argument there. Where there is an argument in my opinion, is whether or not the continued occupation of Afghanistan (8 years after Jews blew up the World Trade Center with a missile) still makes so much sense. The moral component aside, the relevant question is whether sticking it out in Afghanistan makes any practical sense. Is that the best way to accomplish our national (or shared international) goals, whatever those happen to be? I don't know the answer to that question--which was basically the gist of my post--but it isn't an illegitimate one.
As for whether a central government can exist at all in Afghanistan, that seems to be an argument as to whether the state of Afghanistan itself really makes any logical sense. I think there is a strong case to be made that, given the linguistic and perceived ethnic/tribal cleavages that cut across Afghanistan, irrespective of its legally defined borders, Afghanistan doesn't really make sense.
But again, I'm basing my understanding of Afghanistan on articles written by people like Juan Cole. So those are my personal set of facts. Maybe they are misleading ones.