Afghanistan Note

Blue Mosque, Mazar-e-Sharif, site of the grave of Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. Photo by Steve Evans, 2005, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do we want to talk about Afghanistan? Not really. Maybe just to acknowledge that it feels pretty bad, and propose an official apology of sorts, not just for destroying the country, but for our inexhaustible conviction that we were actually fixing it, like deluded Americans in a Graham Greene story, the same story as always.

I feel especially bad because I found myself, in the last few weeks, starting to sort of believe people getting interviewed on BBC World Service, Afghan and US officials, suggesting everything might be fine, there's an excellently trained and richly equipped Afghan army. Everything was not fine, as we've been hearing for a while now. most importantly in this huge 2019 work from the Washington Post: 

In one interview, Thomas Johnson, a Navy official who served as a counterinsurgency adviser in Kandahar province, said Afghans viewed the police as predatory bandits, calling them “the most hated institution” in Afghanistan. An unnamed Norwegian official told interviewers that he estimated 30 percent of Afghan police recruits deserted with their government-issued weapons so they could “set up their own private checkpoints” and extort payments from travelers.

Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told government interviewers that the Afghan police were ineffective “not because they’re out-gunned or out-manned. It’s because they are useless as a security force and they’re useless as a security force because they are corrupt down to the patrol level. 

The army has melted away in 18 provincial capitals. Thousands of soldiers didn't exist at all in the first place—they were ghost recruits for whom somebody got paid, but they hadn't actually been recruited. Thousands of soldiers hadn't received their own pay in months; somebody pocketed that. It's the same old story—while the US thought it was creating stable institutions in the country, it was feeding a web of corruption creating the illusion of stable institutions, but most of the institutions weren't entirely real. The girls' schools are great, no doubt, as they also were in the days of Soviet dominance, and will be again, perhaps, when the Chinese come with their Belt and Road engineers to build some infrastructure and set up some schools where Chinese is taught. I'm just making that up, but you wouldn't be surprised.

Where there's actual fighting, as opposed to the Taliban just sweeping in and announcing that they're taking over, is where nobody ever pretended the Afghan army existed; in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, home of Hazara people and the warlord Uzbek and Tajik factions, where the atmosphere is relatively open and secular and the Pashtun Taliban are really hated, after the terrible massacres of thousands of civilians when they took over in 1997-98, and the resistance is from local militias that existed long before the Americans came. The Afghan army isn't even relevant, which is why it might almost survive again while the rest of the country goes dark.

Mazar is its own coherent place, with its own coherent (and yet densely multicultural) culture—it's said to be where the great 13th-century poet and theologian Jalal al-Din Rumi originally hailed from. Afghanistan, in contrast, is a very weird concept. It's been the "graveyard of empires", as people love to say, since Alexander the Great tried to conquer it in the 4th century B.C.E., but it still hasn't achieved a clear identity. 

But the moral of the story isn't even about Afghanistan; it's about the Americans trying to build a certain kind of social organization, in Cuba or Haiti, in the Philippines, in the banana republics, in Vietnam. The only way it works at all is if the local people, whoever they are and however they got there, decide to do it themselves, just the way the original white people in Virginia and Massachusetts (and Texas and Hawaii!) did, making all kinds of terrible mistakes and cruel misjudgments, and end up like Tunisia with the same kind of half-assed thing, instead of some other half-assed thing like Libya that you really wanted to avoid. It's people having the latitude to make their own choices, which has happened in Tunisia because Tunisia wasn't "strategically important" enough for the Americans to really mess with it. There's no cookbook. 

I don't even know what I thought they were doing, in Afghanistan, in the last 10 or 15 years. I didn't quite imagine they were trying to do that thing yet again, creating a ruling class that lies to the Americans and makes whatever money they can out of the system before they, too, melt away. Leaving all the simple people let down and terrified.

Update: And government forces in Mazar collapsed before the day was over.