Unintended Consequences in Afghanistan

The Danger of Good Intentions

We argued recently for the reform of foreign policy along more classical Christian lines. At the level of government interference in the affairs of other nations the duty is to maintain a splendid isolation and a strict, but armed, neutrality. At the levels of cultural interchange, trade, and non-governmental contact there ought to be as much contact and interaction with other nations and peoples as citizens and corporations freely desire.

The closest modern exemplar of splendid isolation is Switzerland. We believe this to be a more fundamentally and consistently Christian position than the foreign policies of the post-Christian West which appeal to vague religious or philosophical notions about universal "human rights" as a pretext to interfere in the affairs of other nations.

Human affairs, cultures, traditions, beliefs and motives are so complex and disparate that interference in other nations in a manner which seeks justification and leverage from some supposed "human rights" almost always creates more problems than it solves. It tears apart the historical fabric of cultures, creating a vacuum abhorred by nature.

The media is now starting to focus upon "Obama's War"--the escalation of American military activity in Afghanistan. Body bag numbers are starting to rise. It is clear to the more enlightened US military minds that the defeat of the Taleban will require cultural and social change in southern Afghanistan. Yet the more attention is directed at the comprehensive transformation required, the longer the estimates of American involvement in Afghanistan become.

The NZ Herald carried an article recently on the difficulties faced.

Though Western politicians have long described the war in Afghanistan as being fought to defend the Afghan people against the Taleban, the tougher truth is that the Taleban, almost exclusively composed of members of the Pashtun tribes who comprise at least 40 per cent of the country's population, are an integral part of the Afghan people.

In part, the Taleban represent the conservative, rural, religious Pashtun Afghanistan; in contrast, the more modern, cosmopolitan, urban Afghanistan of Kabul, the current government and its power base among the country's non-Pashtun ethnic minorities, are the people who stand most to profit from the success of the Western-run "modernisation" of the country.

The Taleban are southern, rural Afghanistan. You can defeat them militarily for a time, but they will come back, and back, and back for they are the people of that region. Afghanistan itself is deeply divided--with the fractures going back generations, if not centuries. Appeals to universal human rights will just not cut it folks. All that will happen is the stirring up of hatred of the invader.

Though some fight for cash, interviews with captured and active Taleban reveal the insurgents to be less motivated by economics than many think. Power, politics, culture, feuds, ethnicity, tribal vendettas and Afghan history also play a big part. Often the Western coalition is unwittingly deepening longstanding divisions in an Afghan society fragmented by decades of conflict and competition for scarce resources. The National Army should bind the country closer together. But its upper ranks are dominated by former communist officers who in the 1980s fought with the Russians against the fathers of many of the new Taleban commanders.

Northern Afghanistan is controlled by warlords and powers that are odious to the tribes in the south. US involvement has already led to dubious compromises. For example, CNN recently reported that President Obama has called for an investigation into an alleged atrocity by one northern Afghan warlord where hundreds of Taleban prisoners are said to have been executed. The warlord involved (Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum) has been a US ally and received US funding and military support. He is close to President Karzai and is currently serving as Minister of Defence.

This is a no-win situation. To change Afghani culture will not be accomplished even in fifteen years of US military involvement (which Pentagon advisers are now arguing as necessary). But the electorates in the West will not tolerate such a long involvement, especially when it means deaths.

In a bid to assuage the public and find an exit, politicians are now frantically "relooking objectives" in Afghanistan, as one London official put it. Having been told that the troops are there to build a better future for tens of millions of people and to liberate Afghan women as well as stamp out the runaway narcotics industry and catch Osama bin Laden, the sudden shift in rhetoric grates.

No one seems very sure what "victory" actually looks like any longer. Winning, an ISAF officer says, "means a viable Afghan governance capacity at provincial or district level" which is hardly what the dead soldiers' families thought that they were fighting for.

It is almost inevitable that Afghanistan will become a suppurating wound in the US body politic. We can hear our opponents saying--well, it worked in Iraq. That war was won. Mmmm. We believe that "winning" was more the result of Al Qaeda making themselves odious in the eyes of the warring Iraqi Shiite and Sunni factions. Now we will see the reality of the peace that was won as the US withdraws. Our expectations are not high. (Al Qaeda will not be able to make that same mistake in Afghanistan because Al Qaeda is dominated and controlled by the Taleban.)

Good intentions do not ensure good outcomes when one nation interferes in the affairs of another. As one Boston University historian recently put it:

When it comes to the exercise of power, the idealist intent on doing God’s work is likely to wreak as much havoc as the cynic who rejects God’s very existence. Those who credit themselves with acting at the behest of the purest motives are hardly less likely to perpetrate evil than those who dismiss ideals as sheer poppycock.

Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that “we” are good while “they” are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of9/11 —will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one’s own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.

Whether feigned or real, therefore, innocence poses a problem. Good intentions informed by the simplistic belief that the world can be fixed and things set right only succeed in killing people.

President Obama is full of good intentions. His war is well intentioned. Its fruits and outcome are likely to be something else entirely.