Afghanistan Again

I have felt uneasy about the Afghani adventure on which our armed forces embarked after the Sept 11 catastrophe in New York. Not that there wasn't justification for an expedition to try and stop the agents of 9/11, but it seemed perhaps too much mission creep to not only punish Al Qaeda and capture those responsible for the planning of the New York terrorist strike, but overthrow the government of Afghanistan and replace it with... what? A democracy? How similar is that to what the Soviet Union tried to do?

We are now into four years of helping Afghanistan. The Taliban have been driven to the borders and inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they are helping destabilize that country. But the Taliban, or some insurgent force, has not been driven from the land. As we all know, insurgencies cannot survive without the support of the populace, so it seems apparent that the Taliban have support, if only in certain areas (like everywhere except Kabul).

Our horror at the Taliban government and so our support for the overthrow of that government by the so-called Northern Alliance seems to have been engineered in the same way our horror at Saddham Hussain’s troops “rape” of the maternity wards in the Kuwaiti hospitals were engineered, playing on our western sensitivities and suspicion of the other.

The current government in Afghanistan has had to deal recently with the Western world’s reaction to their Islamic constitution, which under law would have dictated the execution of a Muslim man whose apparent crime was to convert to Christianity. Fortunately the court seems to have decided he was crazy, and thus not responsible for his actions, or able to stand trial. This condition of madness has not always been seen in Texas as sufficient to prevent execution, but never mind.

Under the Taliban there is no doubt he would have been executed, but is that a sufficient difference? I believe he has been found mad to let the court off the hook – it might stop the flow of cash, or at least slow it slightly if he were to be executed.

The Taliban tried to rule Afghanistan the way Europe was ruled only 600 years ago, with no nuance or mercy to the law. Remember the Cathar – slaughtered en masse because they weren’t the proper brand of Christianity.

The current Government of Afghanistan has warlords as democratic representatives, a President hand-picked by the Government of the US to rule, survives on not just hand-outs, but generous bribes to the warlords who really control the countryside, has gone from supplying less than 10% of the opium for heroin in the world to almost 90% currently. One wonders what the growers in the hills around Laos are doing for a buck these days.

What then are we trying to do in Afghanistan?

We need (oh, wait for it) a vigorous debate about our position in Afghanistan, the reason we have troops there, what they can accomplish and whether they can accomplish that while working closely with US Forces, or whether we should be trying to do something elsewhere (perhaps Darfur). Hopefully the debate might ignite one on what our foreign policy is, and in light of that foreign policy, what the mission of our military might be.