On 10 Jul 2006 01:52:46 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
An imploding dust bowl
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1816862,00.html
Afghanistan has never been a 'successful' state, and we can't create a
new civil society at gunpoint
Peter Preston
Monday July 10, 2006
The Guardian
The trouble is that we deceive ourselves. So a nation stands silent for
two minutes in honour of the 52 who died, while TV commentators and
politicians invoke the rhetoric of "the war on terror". So, in a
faraway places like Helmand province, British soldiers perish for the
same supposedly simple cause. We must "let the writ of the Afghan
government run", according to our defence secretary. We must, in the
parlance, rescue "a failed state".
But nobody pauses to observe that Afghanistan has never, ever, been a
successful state. It hasn't failed, for there has seldom been a
worthwhile period of steady governance and legality, let alone freedom,
throughout its tortured history. It is, and always has been, a dust
bowl of violence, lawlessness and profound instability. And the fact
that we don't see that instantly, that we bumble along hoping to create
some new civil society at gunpoint, comes straight back to George
Bush's original 9/11 formulation and the "war" word. Wars - even wars
against terrorist groups like Eta or the IRA - are waged between
finite, coherent forces. They may end, as those two have ended, via
submission or negotiation. There is a structure to them.
But the particular difficulty with al-Qaida is that it doesn't fit that
pattern - and thus any eventual resolution is non-negotiable. And the
particular, grievous difficulty with Afghanistan, far worse than Iraq,
is that there is no structure in place to build on. Plaster it with aid
and the benign patter of the ballot box, and you'll still see your
dreams come to nothing. This, in so many ways, is a medieval country, a
land that time has passed by. It cannot be spun five centuries forward
by bemused brigades from Nato who can't understand who the enemy is or
why it hates them so. It pays no heed to the collected speeches of Tony
Blair. Try a history of the hundred years' war instead.
Of course, these differences are difficult to comprehend. They don't
feature in standard military textbooks where battles for hearts and
minds have an honoured place. They don't even fit with Baghdad, where an
uncivil society still somehow exists among the debris. Watch an Afghan
tribesman on the hillside using the Stingers that the CIA showered on
him 20 years ago and you may think you see a sophisticated (if
dishevelled) fighting man. What you don't see is a sophisticated
political operator ready to trade in his hardware for a tractor, World
Bank grant and single transferable vote.
Democracy simply has no roots in this soil. Perhaps, you could say, King
Zahir Shah tried to plant a few seeds of it during his 40 years of
feeble power, but they blew away at the first puff of ambition from the
zealots and gangsters who ousted him. And remember always that Kabul,
with its assassinations and plots, is more of an old city state, cut off
from an unchanging countryside - and that the countryside in the
south-east stretches, without physical borders, into the wastelands of a
Baluchistan where Pakistan's own writ barely runs.
Yet again, the terminology of conventional conflict deludes. Why doesn't
General Pervez Musharraf "clamp down" on the Baluchis and Pashtuns?
Because, politically and militarily, that's impossible. His command and
control levers don't function out here. And see how the words we use
also suffer from precision creep. Once upon a very recent time, the
Taliban came to prominence, with some popular support, because they
tried to clean up a land of drug warlords, the same people who are back
in big business since their fall. Now defence secretary Browne talks
earnestly about vanquishing "the Taliban drug warlords".
It's an idiotic conflation. What we're really talking about is a melee
of different groupings, some idealistic, some criminal, uniting as usual
against any outside force. The Taliban, with a little malign help from
their Pakistani friends, were and are young Afghans, not some foreign
implant: the warlords who still run so much in a nation of bewildering
ethnic mixes, over 70 languages spoken, are often tribal leaders too.
When British soldiers die in Helmand, they are killed by Afghans, just
as Red Army soldiers were once killed. Why don't their killers see that
we're only trying to help? Because they don't.
In the end the Taliban would have fallen anyway. That's what happens to
every Afghan regime. It implodes, and is replaced. Communism came and
went. Mullah Omar's own brand of militant Islam would have gone too. But
"wars" against terror dictated something more proactive, more surgical,
more supposedly glorious. Forget it, alas. And forget also the thought
that "more" troops will "finish the job". This is Afghanistan: and the
job, whatever it is, has barely begun.
p.preston@guardian.co.uk
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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