Afghanistan: No we can’t [June 2010 / CCT]

Ok, the proximate occasion of this column is the firing of the general in charge of our Afghanistan adventure. But that fraught mountain region has been in the media for all kinds of good news, bad news.

June 14 headline: “Afghanistan at a turning point …Nation sits on $1 trillion in mineral wealth.” Good news, right? All this potential wealth, discovered by Pentagon officials and American geologists “could attract heavy investment.” With a little help from their friends they could become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

More good news: A dinner recently in Washington DC to honor Laura Bush for her part in launching the American funded American University of Afghanistan. Not an indigenous effort, but education is education, right? They can sure use a new properly educated young generation who will know how to realize the potential of all that mineral wealth.

But the news has not been all rosy. “Afghan security firms suspected of extortion” ran a June 22 headline. Seems that the protection money paid to protect from the Taliban convoys of supplies to our army fighting the Taliban goes to … the Taliban. In order to fight the Taliban we are paying the Taliban $2 to $4 million a week of our tax money.

And of course there’s the ongoing, pesky collateral damage, the killing of civilians which is irking the hell out of the civilians, who don’t always understand that to us pro-American locals look a lot like bad locals. Which of course probably means that, with this unintentional negative PR, there are fewer and fewer pro-American locals.

And now the news about the lack of morale at the top.

But the contradictions of our MO over there are nothing compared with the lack of a clear goal. Instead of light at the end of the tunnel, what you can dimly make out is just more quagmire.

When Obama gave his big speech last December he talked about getting the “job” done and getting out by mid-2011, with the emphasis on the getting out. But what was that job, exactly? “Give Afghanistan back to the Afghans…Afghanistan is not lost..” he declared. But lost to what? Would the (unlikely) worst case scenario, the indigenous Taliban getting power again, mean it was lost? Were we lost to the Wall Street gamblers and criminals who wrecked the economy? If the Tea Party led by our charismatic Sarah were to achieve power, would we look to a good secular country like France to come over and help us find our way? Our “job” seems to be keep Afghanistan from getting lost to its own history, from slipping back into its own process.

If Afghanistan is lost, what its being, with our help, found would mean is being more like us. A wealthy and properly educated Afghanistan would be sure make them more like us, wouldn’t it? Our basic problem is that we can’t, or won’t, imagine that another country could be different from us, could want to be different from us. We have no interest in an Afghan Afghanistan. What we really want to do in Afghanistan is replace their history and ways with our own. Only that would make us comfortable (and also to the p oint, make those possible investors comfortable).

That infamous Curtis LeMay solution to the Vietnam quagmire of bombing the Vietnamese back into the Stone Age was a refreshing revelation of the hidden subplot of all our foreign interventions: it would be so cool if we could just get rid of the quagmire–the other place with all that mucky otherness (language, history, customs)–and start from scratch, the way we did here once we had got rid of the injuns. We’re all about a clean slate. 

The LeMay method would no doubt accomplish much more completely and efficiently what the new American University or the “heavy investment” in the country’s mineral wealth would do. But in this sadder-but-wiser era no one is proposing such a solution, least of all our genuinely idealistic and well-motivated President. If only he would see that short of the LeMay method, when it comes to Afghanistan: No, we can’t.

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