Afghanistan Stocktake

So, How's It Working Out, Then?

Readers of this blog will know that we oppose the war in Afghanistan as an ill-considered utopian debacle, without ethical foundation.

To say this is not to deny the courage or skill or tenacity or application of the combatants on both sides.  But it is to say that whilst the US fight in Afghanistan began as a defensive invasion to defend the US against Al Qaeda--a perfectly legitimate moral and just action--it soon morphed into "nation building", which is unethical and imperialistic.  It is a classic example of the adage that little wars grow into big wars and big wars suck out all your blood. 

But, we really could not expect anything else, given the US's maniacal utopian vision of bestowing the West's peculiar, secular "human rights" doctrine on the rest of humanity.
  And if bestowal won't work, then there is always the barrel of a gun.  But sooner or later, no matter how big one's military might, resources dry up, expenses mount, and people become war weary.  Consequently, there is just no way that Obama and Clinton are going to go to war in Syria--the current hotspot--to impose western human rights utopianism on that nation, because as the headline in Drudge brazenly put it: "You can't overthrow them all."   The US has gone a bridge too far. 

The spurious messianic ideology is as fervently held as ever of course.  It's just that the US is exhausted, having been fighting continually somewhere in the world ever since the Vietnam War.  Making "the world safe for democracy" is a big task.  Acting as the world's Messiah is a huge burden that would bring any nation to its knees eventually. 

In Afghanistan it is becoming more clear by the day that the US has lost, not only the will to fight, but the war itself.  It will depart that country only to see it return to precisely the same country it was before the US began its arrogant "nation building".  This from The Guardian:

The civilian death toll for the war in Afghanistan reached a record high last year with 3,021 deaths, according to the United Nations.  The number killed rose by 8% last year – the fifth consecutive rise – with a further 4,507 civilians wounded, the UN report said. Many were killed by roadside bombs or in suicide attacks, with Taliban-affiliated militants responsible for three-quarters of the deaths.

The number of deaths caused by suicide bombings jumped to 450, an 80% increase over the previous year, even though the number of suicide attacks remained about the same.  "A decade after the war began, the human cost of it is still rising," said Georgette Gagnon, director for human rights for the UN mission in Afghanistan.  The single deadliest suicide attack since 2008 occurred on 6 December, when a bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest at the entrance of a mosque in Kabul, killing 56 worshippers during the Shia Muslim rituals of Ashoura.  Roadside bombs remain the biggest killer of civilians. The homemade explosives – which can be triggered by a footstep or a vehicle and are often rigged with enough explosives to destroy a tank – killed 967 people in 2011, nearly a third of the total.

The Pashtun tribesmen and the Taliban are fighting for their home valley and the way of life they have known for centuries.  To them it represents who they are; their raison d'etre.   When the US leaves Afghanistan it will immediately revert to what it was before their arrival--yet likely worse.  No amount of scathing criticism of the world-view of Pashtun tribespeople, their culture, their degradation, their cruelty, their oppression of women--all of it justified--will change the outcome.  The fact is inescapable--but rarely acknowledged: you cannot change human hearts and human culture with the barrel of a gun.  What you can do with the gun, however, is to enrage a people to the point of magnificent resentment so that the hold of their culture over their hearts and minds becomes stronger than ever. 

The foolish and unjust actions of the West in Afghanistan have just served to make the primitive culture of Afghanistan tribesmen many times more powerful a stronghold over hearts and minds than it was in the first place.  Western human rights utopianism has a lot to answer for.  But we, in the West, deserve it.  Anyone with half an education in the rudiments of history and human nature could see it coming ten miles off.