War on Drugs Revisited

A story in the New York Times this morning, “White Families Seek a Gentler War on Heroin,” reminded us again of a lot older war, the First Opium War (1839-1842). The background to that war was this: Great Britain was growing opium in Bengal to sell to China—opium being one product for which the Chinese were willing to pay silver; they were, in other economic ways, essentially self-sufficient. The British venture produced an exodus of silver from China and a rise in Chinese opium addicts. The emperor decided to eradicate the traffic—adopting much the same general method we’ve adopted in conducting our own war on drugs. Britain resisted this imperial strategy. Hence by military power, Hong Kong became British and Great Britain also extorted rights to trade freely at five other ports, among them Shanghai.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime maintains statistics, if somewhat dated, on opium and heroin consumption world-wide. A graphic produced by UNODC, which I found here, is shown below:

If we take data for 2008 on opiate user in the United States, we get an estimate of 1.335 million users in that year or, expressed as a percent of the total U.S. population, 0.44 percent. Compared to that percentage (less than half of 1 percent), the problem appears minute—unless the addict is your child.

Virtually all heroin used ultimately traces back to Afghanistan—the country where 92 percent of all opium poppies were grown in 2008. Afghanistan’s share has dropped since then to around 83-84 percent. Curiously, as the following chart, taken from Wikipedia (link) shows, the only time when poppy production was seriously challenged in the last two decades was in 2001—when the Taliban were briefly in charge…

We’re looking here are the disconcerting effects on the mind of scale—tiny numbers and vast expenditures on wars (of all kinds)—at tiny places that produce global problems, and at the persistence of problems ultimately rooted in vast cultural movements which produce, wealth, crowding, stress…and substances that help some people cope—the wrong way.

Pech Valley Revisited

Journalism still thrives here and there. It does so in The Christian Science Monitor. In its most recent issue (September 5, 2011, Volume 103, Issue 41), I read a story yesterday titled “Soldiers’ tale of an epic battle” by Anna Mulrine. One has to go beyond the mainstream media to get genuine reporting. Over the years I’ve found stories that give real insight in such magazines as the CSM, Harper’s, Atlantic, and even more obscure places. The story I point to here is on the web (link), but in fairness to the CSM, why not buy a copy? One has to penetrate beneath the canned, sanitized, propaganda to get a visceral (read human) understanding of how things really are.

This story visits the same Pech River Valley in Afghanistan I’ve pointed to before in two earlier posts (one, two), each time to make the point that we’re massively engaged in what is a pointless pursuit, a vast over-reaction. What it means in human terms is here rendered in old-fashioned journalistic style by Mulrine.

The story also highlights the valor of our fighting forces as they engage in actions that make as little sense to them as they do to us. I’ve served my time as a professional soldier myself, albeit in peaceful times. I understand and honor that world. But the merits of that profession do not transfer automatically to those who send troops into pointless battles.

More Notes on Collectives

I noted the other day: “Human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals.” This, for me, is perhaps the most valuable lesson of history. If the lesson is not internalized, temptations arise to make mistakes in other realms of reality. One is the belief that inorganic matter can yield life or that collectives of conscious beings are in some way superior to individuals.

I think it is wise to view public events as if they were natural events, thus to ignore the fact that rational individuals make decisions and thus shape history. Those are invariably collective decisions, thus a fusion of contradictions. The individuals who make them almost never have adequate knowledge to foresee or the power to shape the outcomes, and the greater the scope of the events, thus the more “collective” they are, the less predictable.

Here Secretary Gates’ muted remark the other day about the differences between wars of necessity and wars of choice is a good illustration. Wars of necessity may be defined as wars imposed on us as organized, large-scale physical attacks on our territories intended minimally to seize them, maximally to take control of the entire collective that we represent. If the aggressor is not a state, with a definable territory of its own, going to war makes no sense. After the 9/11 attacks, a full-scale war on Afghanistan was an overreaction. Afghanistan was the hiding place of a terrorist group—not the attacker. And once the Taliban government had been replaced by another, that over-reaction should have ended—in 2004. Indeed Al Qaida had intended neither to seize our territory nor to replace our government when it destroyed the towers and damaged the Pentagon. The War on Terror that mushroomed out of this was thus irrational, a natural event, in other words—although its raw materials were the collective emotions of a public that, at election time, might have displaced the Bush administration if that administration had merely reacted to 9/11 as it should have—by narrowly-shaped raids on Al Qaida’s camp. It was precisely such raids that President Clinton had staged in 1998, using cruise missiles, when he retaliated for embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Writing this, and remembering Clinton’s limited actions, it occurs to me that irrationality in public life is not necessary. Not necessary but certainly likely—and likely roughly in proportion to the emotional turmoil an event produces in the public as a whole. Now, let us note, irrational impulses in the public can be exploited or tamped down by the administration in power. And the temptation to exploit them will in some way be stimulated by the needs and ambitions of those in power.

Once irrationality takes over—once the horse has the bit in its teeth—it is difficult to bring it under control again. In an open society, rational reasons must be trotted out to explain and justify actions that were, on second thought, altogether wrong. The new product, the new narrative, will then be, again, an incoherent fusion of contradictions, producing yet other irrational decisions.

Yesterday’s presidential announcement to the effect that we’ve now pretty much accomplished our goals in Afghanistan is a consequence of an irrational process, introducing further irrationalities. In wars of necessity, things are simple. In World War II Germany invaded France; Germany had to be pushed out of France. The “goal” was simple, measurable. The German government had to be removed. It was removed. No ambiguities. What our “goals” in Afghanistan might be is as much of a mystery as the location of the territorial lines of “Terror,” whatever terror is. It has no place, it has no organization, no reality, as such—no tangible, visible reality at a scale any great Collective can see. Sad business, listening to the President. He too is reacting to collective emotion; this time the collective emotion is disgust with war. And so he is cooking up a brew of contradictory confusions. He means well. He is a rational being—caught in a kind of storm produced decades ago, because the TV screens in 2001 brought us clouds of smoke surrounding two towers in New York. We barely noted the deaths of 224 people in the embassy bombings of 1998; and only 12 of them had been Americans…

Righteous Indignation

Reading the news of departing Defense Secretary Gates’ comments concerning NATO members this morning, oddly perhaps, produced associations in me of a Wolf Blitzer interview with former President Carter some years ago. Gates criticized NATO countries of lack of enthusiasm in supporting the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The most quoted part of his speech follows:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

The NATO defensive alliance came to be formed, largely at U.S. initiative, to prevent Europe falling into the hands of the Communists. Thus it was de facto an anti-Russian alliance, but legally requires members to come to the aid of any other member nation that is attacked. Now a cold and sober view of today’s situation makes European reluctance to spend heavily on the Afghan war, be it bodies or money, quite understandable. The 9/11 attack on the United States was not by a state actor but by a terrorist group, it took place just shy of ten years ago. In that attack approximately 3,000 people lost their lives and several buildings were destroyed. The American response to this event has been way, way too excessive. It has spawned two costly wars of which Iraq was never linked to the 9/11 attack; the second began as an invasion of a country where the terrorists were located and trained their operatives. That war went far beyond destroying training camps and killing or dispersing the terrorists; it has morphed into a neo-imperialist venture under the new name of nation building.

At minimum Gates’ demands for heavy European participation in the Afghan war stretches the meaning of military alliance to unrecognizable shape. It has come to mean supporting U.S. military efforts, wherever they might take place and for whatever reason—just because, for reasons of our own, not out of any gratitude, we put airfields and troops all over Europe once to keep Europe from going communist.

So why does the Blitzer-Carter interview pop into my mind? Turns out that Gates’ speech and that interview have a common feature. They both represent distortions in reality. The New York Times positions the Gates’ story as righteous and appropriate. Blitzer displayed the same aggressive righteousness in using, back then, what struck me as an almost insulting tone when he interviewed President Carter. The occasion was Carter’s publication of a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book came out on November 14, 2006. The interview in CNN’s so-called Situation Room, took place on November 28. Carter had dared to look at Israeli behavior realistically and soberly rather than politically correctly. That last stance requires that Israeli behavior must always be presented as justified and right, whether it is or is not. Similarly the U.S. position and view of reality must always be seen as correct and right even when it has drifted into collective insanity.

Wars and Nations in These Latter Days

It’s fascinating to ponder how overwhelming military power based on huge wealth and technology have changed the nature of military conflict since the end of World War II—and in time when conflict has been swirling principally in regions that don’t really qualify as nations at all.

The last “conventional” war was the conflict between Iran and Iraq (1980-88). It’s length and horrors are not in our consciousness because it did not involve us directly; and because it did not involve overwhelming might and wealth, it harked back to the past. Our last conventional war was in Korea; it came soon after World War II. All other wars since have been of the guerrilla kind, including Vietnam and the Iraqi conflict. Iraq’s military melted away: no point in fighting shock and awe. Standing armies maneuvering over wide terrain have become temporarily obsolete. Conflict hasn’t disappeared but contenders have adapted to the American reality. Those who’d challenge us—or whose we choose to challenge—must remain invisible. They must make themselves indistinguishable from the population. They must inflict deadly damage in small but many times multiplied doses on relatively isolated pockets of the patrolling overlords. The actual fighting isn’t therefore between armies, corps, or army groups but small, ranger-style combat teams facing irregulars and road-side bombers.

Areas targeted by the us (we mustn’t really call them nations) are fragmented and therefore collectively incoherent jumbles of conflicting interests. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are obvious examples. If American force were removed from these places overnight, civil war would be the immediate consequence as these disturbed societies would once again attempt to establish a, for them, still mythical unity absent even before we came—except on the surface.

Each of these places represents a successor state to colonial rule of some sort—Ottoman, British, Russian, and the British Raj. Iraq? A rough-formed dumpling made of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish bits of dough left over by the Ottomans and re-formed by British imperial cooks. Afghanistan? The battle-ground of half-a-dozen civilizations, an unsymmetrical patchwork quilt of tribal peoples of whom Pashtuns are the most numerous—eleven different language groups. Pakistan? It was virtually impossible to separate just the Muslim parts of India and make a coherent state from it in the days of Ali Jinnah and the breakup of the British Raj. The Muslims are not all Sunni, the conflicts with the Shi’ite minority flare frequently. Nearly 3 million Hindus couldn’t quite make it out of there back in the British days. And on the western edge of the country are tribal areas literally escaping all effective rule—and these tribes intermixed and often in conflict too.

In Pakistan itself I discern five or six semi-independent forces: the military, the intelligence portion of the military, the nobility, the Sunni street, the Shi’ite minority, and the western tribes. Speaking of Pakistan as if it meant anything genuinely coherent is just a manner of speaking that remains without content until we understand exactly which parts we’re talking about and how these parts are currently aligned against and/or with others—and the ambiguous “and/or” is very pertinent to such areas as these. Not surprisingly we can intervene at will anywhere in Pakistan; there is no single power that effectively rules there.

The fighting itself is interesting. We move huge masses of troops, tanks, armor to distant lands. There we build, at vast expense, American settlements for them—with all of the necessary infrastructure not least huge embassies housed in city-sized palaces to govern over our presence. But the actual fighting is by tiny groups; ours arrive sometimes riding mules because the helicopters cannot land. Fighting is by exposure—to improvised explosive devices. Or by exposure—to sniper fire. Bombing is no longer deployed to destroy an opposing nation’s productive might. We spare factories and power plants; we need them for the soon-to-follow nation-building step. But building nations out of raw materials like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan requires millennia, not years. Bombing is of compounds or of vehicles moving on roads; collateral damage is therefore unavoidable.

But I note that our ways of thought remain behind, still rooted in modes of thinking appropriate for World War II. We still treat vast aggregations of jumbled ethnic and tribal societies as if they were nations; we act as if the enemy is centrally directed by the equivalent of a nation state; we go to war as if we’re facing armies when in fact we’re facing persistent but endlessly many pockets of resistance, people who already act as if they felt—in their bones, perhaps?—that civilization as we know is the past and not the future. But we keep stumbling, fumbling, flailing on. Why? Because we can still afford it? An image rises in my mind. It is of a theatrical company engaged in a performance. A tornado has just ripped up the theater and carried it off. The company remains on stage under the open sky, surrounded by ravaged trees. But the actors continue on; they voice lines with flawless enunciation, follow stage directions with strict discipline, stand before a mirror that just flew away, pretend to handle objects no longer there. Why? The show! It must go on!

Combat Outpost Michigan

View Larger Map

It’s time to say good-bye. The map you see here is a part of eastern Afghanistan, Kunar Province. The curving formation in the upper mid portion of the map, running down from the left corner, is the valley of the Pech river. The Kunar and Pech rivers meet at Asadabad. Combat Outpost Michigan is a spot on this map in the river valley almost exactly north of the e in the Google logo at the bottom, left. Up-river from it is Forward Operating Base Blessing. Down-river from it are Cop Able Main and Cop Honaker-Miracle, each being U.S. Military outposts. [I cannot annotate a Google map or I’d show the outposts.]

This is a very rough mountainous region where our forces have been unable to take genuine hold. A little less than a year ago in April I noted on this blog (here) that we were abandoning the Korangal Valley. That valley is the dark depression pointing right at Combat Outpost Michigan. Leaving Korangal Valley was evidently only a beginning. Now all American forces will be withdrawn from the Pech Valley, although Afghan forces will be left behind.

The New York Times this morning quotes one military official giving a rationale for this withdrawal. “What we figured out is that people in the Pech really aren’t anti-U.S. or anti-anything, they just want to be left alone. Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.”

Brigitte and I noted, oh, a month ago approximately, an absolutely glowing report in the Media by a Congressional delegation to Afghanistan. Everything looked rosy, upbeat. There was talk of a change in momentum, etc. Today’s announcement of withdrawal, couched in positive terms as redeploying troops to protect more populated areas, was made by Major General Campbell—not by General Petraeus (of course). Never mind the explanations; never mind the casualties sustained first in the Korangal Valley and then in the Pech region. What interests me is that rationale put out by the military spokesman. That might me right on, a bull’s eye, actually. The statement probably applies to the entire Afghanistani population, except for its Quisling leadership—and not just to the inhabitants of the Pech Valley.

Intelligence-Driven...

But we believe that the use of intelligence-driven, precision, targeted operations against high-value insurgents and their networks is a key component of our comprehensive civilian-military operations.
     [Hillary Clinton in defense of General Petraeus]

Can sophisticated phrasing hide a grimmer sort of truth? Is it possible that in many cases “intelligence-driven” sometimes only means that Afghanistanis are using the U.S. military to do away with their enemies? That those enemies may not be insurgents at all? It is extraordinarily difficult, I would submit, to operate in theaters where our own people don’t themselves speak Pashtu, Dari, Urdu, Arabic, or, for that matter any other language that people of the Islamic realm actually speak. Further, we have far too few people who’ve themselves spent long enough actually living the kind of life that enables them to “read” the population as we can read our own. The more sophisticated the language about a conflict, the less we should trust it. Such language hides the truth.

The Metrics Won't Save Us

The other day I listened, if only briefly, to a C-SPAN broadcast of a conference. Participants were all in some way linked to an analytical element of the State Department focused on Afghanistan and much concerned with metrics, thus the measurement of how we are achieving desirable goals there, among which participants listed market systems and electoral politics. The discourse was extraordinarily sophisticated, the participants glitteringly bright, young, and strikingly articulate: insiders addressing their own kind, entirely relaxed. Both the staring herd of cattle, the great unwashed, and the howling packs of punditry—were on the screen’s other side.

The intensity of the presentation, the brittleness of abstract concepts applied here to a tribal region where paved roads are rare and animals still serve as transport simply startled me and, breaking away to seek the shade outdoors, I allowed the dark prophetic waves of reaction to wash over me as I watched the bees, deeply rooted nature all about me. The bright disquisition still running faintly on the kitchen’s TV set represented the opposite, an unanchored floating in air on clouds of spent petroleum. It was the balsamic distillate of the same mode of thought that, in coarser form, directs not only the mechanical forces on the ground in Afghanistan but, indeed, our entire civilization. And the thought in my mind was simple: secular societies do not survive a conflict with the organic after a certain stage is reached—however primitive the latter, however rich the former. That stage, I think, is here now. A time of shatter, of disassociation, is clearly upon us now and manifesting everywhere. Nor is it, I would propose, a temporary phenomenon to be set right at the next election. How did Yeats put it? Didn’t he say that the metrics do not hold?

My own metrics would begin with the application of the command, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’d put myself in the Afghans’ place to start my measurement, and here’s what I would discover. If I were an Afghan—and never mind the category—I would view the invading forces, no matter what kind, American, NATO, wouldn’t matter—as aggressors, and never mind how hard my fate might be or how much I might oppose domestic enemies. Out, out, damned invaders. That’d be my stance. I wouldn’t want their market system, their electoral politics, their ways of doing this, their ways of doing that. I would have no respect whatever for those who, for personal gain, cooperated. I’d bide my time until the foreigners relaxed their hold. And then I’d try to set things right.

This reminds me of something my brother-in-law once said, a saying famous in our family. Rex is a genuine Ozarks farmer, hunter, and fisherman who knows things about woods, rivers, lakes, and land the rest of us can’t even dream of. He once said, “I wouldn’t like bridge—even if I knew how to play it.”

Another Update of My Afghan "Memories"

First Anglo-Afghan War, 1839-1842. The British got involved in Afghanistan because the Russian Empire was expanding south and east and the British Empire was extending its domination of India to the north and west. Russia had already made some arrangements with Persia; Persia had claims on Afghan territory. The British saw Afghanistan as a highly desirable buffer state blocking Russian incursions from the north. This episode can be seen as one of the confrontations between expansive imperial states attempting to control Central Asian territories. The Afghans managed to defeat the British and expelled the British-imposed Shuja Shah Durrani. Britain withdrew most of the 21,000 troops it had used in the invasion but occupied Afghanistan for a spell with a remnant of 4,500 men, but internal rebellion eventually forced it to withdraw these as well. All members of the military remnant were killed during the retreat from Kabul—but one, a Dr. William Broydon. The British also had what were called 12,000 camp followers—a category we now, I think, call contractors.

Second Anglo-Afghan War, 1878-1880. This conflict had exactly the same cause, Russian-British rivalry. Independent Afghanistan’s ruler then was Emir Sher Ali. The Russians sent a diplomatic mission to Kabul despite Ali’s protests. In response the British attempted to send a mission too, but it was stopped in the Khyber pass and could not continue. Whereupon Britain launched a force of 40,000 to try again, as it were. This time the British were more successful. Afghanistan retained internal rule of its people, but Britain controlled its foreign affairs. The cartoon, from Wikipedia here, drawn in the time of the conflict, summarizes it nicely: there is Emir Sher Ali squeezed between the rivals—and the caption tells it all. Nothing’s changed except the shape of the hat.

Here is a difficult mountainous terrain blocking, if linked to Iran’s northern mountain ranges, the North’s access to the sea and to the fertile Indian subcontinent, and (these days) the access from the South to the oil deposits in the North. Worth noting is that once upon a time the Silk Road passed through Afghanistan, running East to West, making the same region a point of conflict for another reason.

A quote from an earlier survivor of the first Anglo-Afghan War, the Reverend G.R. Gleig, suggests the same-old, same-old quality of that earlier conflict and the current. Gleig wrote that this was “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.” The quote is from this article by William Dalrymple (a favorite around here).

So, remind me again—this subject is as difficult as picturing a four-dimensional crucifix—what is our motivation for being there?

Graveyard of Empires?

The term is applied to Afghanistan because western powers—the British, the Soviets, and now the Americans—have found it difficult to overcome. By a rather convoluted route that began with thinking of “Alph the sacred river” of Coleridge fame, I came across an empire that evidently had had no problem mastering the region. The empire? The Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan. Here is a fascinating map of the region as of 1280 (courtesy of Wikipedia). I note that at its greatest extent, circa 1241, it covered the place of Brigitte's birth in Poland and my birth in Budapest and extended eastward all the way to the Korean peninsula. This was the extension of Ghengis Khan’s realm by his grandchild the Kublai Khan (1215-1294), founder of the Yuan Dynasty in China. It was a simpler world then, one supposes. Here was a man who managed to rule over Russia and China at the same time, the tip of his boot well inside Europe, with ports that could simultaneously access the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The image of the Mongols as wild men riding horses and staying briefly before retiring to ferment mare’s milk in yurts needs a corrective it seems to me. Coleridge tried: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree: where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea…”

Noted...

Herewith some things I’ve noted as McChrystal’s dismissal unfolded in slow motion over the last two days. I noted with a certain bemusement that two retired general, selected by PBS’ NewsHour as commentators, on Tuesday night, praised the general effusively. One called McChrystal “a warrior,” with emphasis, and several times. I wondered what he meant by this word. Did he mean that in the conduct of war grandstanding before a reporter—in fact apparently trying to impress the reporter by saying naughty things about a number of different leading figures, not least Vice President Biden—is the quality of a warrior? Is that what he meant? Did he mean that a warrior is a person out of control? That to lead American troops we should select berserkers? Is “warrior” in military circles equivalent to “hard-drinking womanizer” in literary circles? — a phrase sure to sanctify the “genuine artist,” or the “deep thinker”? I see the phrase all the time, most recently self-applied to himself by that notable God-debunker, Christopher Hitchens.

I noted my own anxiety that McChrystal might be retained in command, something that, these days, is actually thinkable. And noted next my satisfaction that he was not. And noted the paradoxical aspects of that. Yes, appropriate forms should be maintained, but the war in Afghanistan is still a kind of madness without rational grounding, so my satisfaction had a kind of empty feel.

I noted the pretense, at least I hope it was pretense, that a “decision process” was unfolding. These matters are straight-forward and need no discussion at all. The generals in the media were all wringing their hands—although I did note one lonely retired colonel on CNN who had the right view and bravely stuck to it. A genuine warrior, perhaps.

Last I noted that McChrystal got appointed to his command by people who must have known the pattern of his entire career—which was pockmarked, as it were, by inappropriate behavior. It looks like Petraeus (whose protégé McChrystal was, and whom he is replacing), Gates, McChrystal’s strong supporter, and others on Obama’s staff were touched and charmed by the “bad boy” image all along but thought themselves magically immune to its reckless consequences.

I discern beneath this that if reason fails and flailing takes over as the chief strategy, choosing a bad boy is the appropriate profile for the man in charge. The thought might be that in a crazy world perhaps the mad commander will succeed by sheer accident. In an insurgency, use an insurgent?

Principles, Realism...or What? Ooze?

One of the peculiar features of life in modern society—in which appeal to rationality and principles is but one of multiple options—is that processes that may have begun rationally enough, thus based on principle, can go on indefinitely for no good reason whatsoever. The war in Afghanistan is an example. Principles derived from game theory suggest that it’s rational to meet an attack with an equivalent counter-punch. Natural law permits self-defense. The corollary of this initial reaction is that if the other party then subsides, we should do the same. Escalation is bad strategy.

In modern times, however, where power appears to depend on the emotional state of large collectives, symbols used to rally the public take on an ever greater role. The 9/11 attack on three buildings was linked to a single person, Osama bin Laden, and an elusive movement called Al-Qaeda. We attacked both but did not achieve what we call “closure” today. But we did destroy bin Laden’s camp and drove Al-Qaeda underground. That should have satisfied us. After achieving that, we should have subsided. We did not.

We did not because symbols we raised and caused to become much larger than life persist. Our leadership raised those symbols to shape and manage public expectations, thus to maintain itself in power. And this process continued even after the leadership changed. Notice the evolution of the symbolism. It began with the names of one leader and one group. It became a “war on terror” (however one is to define that) or “Islamic terrorism,” which suddenly had us fighting all of Islam. We’ve also worshipped—ever since it escaped our grasp in Vietnam—something we’ve called Victory, and for the same reason. But this concept is sufficiently vague under current circumstances so that we cannot claim it. What is wrong?

Al-Qaeda had no borders. It just happened to have its camps in Afghanistan. We expanded the conflict to Afghanistan as a whole—and specifically to the Pashtun group that then controlled it, the Taliban—in search of a “closure” that had been expanded in definition to what? The eradication of a whole civilization or, at least, its way of life? A rational and principled response to an attack on one of our centers with an attack on the centers of those who presumably caused the attack on us has evolved into a war against Afghanistan and, because of very permeable borders, with parts of Pakistan. No end in sight. We’re now at war everywhere in a small way at least. In this process we’ve also engineered a war with Iraq for which no rational grounds existed at all.

I ponder this now that the definition of “victory” is once more complexifying. Evidently it means that Afghanistan must be turned into a republic recognizably like our own, with regular elections, a consumption culture, competing parties, a real economy, and people who look reasonably like our own so that we can finally relax. But this isn’t in the cards.

I wonder if humanity has ever encountered this particular problem before—namely one in which vast masses of voters, manipulated by symbols, call the shots without wishing to do so and cause the leaders to behave in entirely irrational ways that the public, although it does wish to do so, cannot stop.

Marginalia...

... or thoughts that occur reading or watching the news.

• Karzai fires two cabinet officers U.S. authorities happen to like. It occurs to me that the Afghanistanis are fed up with the USA and have been for quite a while, not least those who profit by our presence in some way. The most sincere among them engage us in arms.
• NYT headline today: “Turkey Goes From Pliable Ally to Thorn for U.S.” The subhead elaborates, saying: “Policies on Israel and Iran Show a New Assertiveness.” Three things occur to me. One is that “Iran,” in that subhead, really also means Israel. Iran is not a threat to the U.S. Our most recent direct contact with Iran was our imposition of an emperor to rule that nation. Iran has proved itself one of the most peaceful powers in, say, the last century—defending itself when attacked by Iraq. In that one we were helping Saddam Hussein on the sly. The second is that Turkey-bashing is now permissible because we no longer need Turkey as a stalwart ally against the Soviet Menace. Third is the interesting assumption that “assertiveness” is inappropriate, no matter what, and that Turkey ought quietly to swallow the death of its nationals at the hands of Israeli commandos to retain its highly desirable status as a pliable ally.

Korangal and Marja

View Larger Map

This map shows a region our military calls “The Valley of Death.” The marker roughly indicates the location of the Korangal Outpost which we are now abandoning. Google shrugs when I ask it to find Korangal, but using the New York Times map inset today, I've centered the map on Sarkani, which approximately marks the location of the outpost. Jalalabad lies to the southwest, Peshawar to the southeast of this area.


View Larger Map

This map shows the location of Marjah in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, the “site” of a major offensive launched in February against a center supposedly 80,000 people strong. This is the terrain map of the place. I search in vain for signs of a city worthy even of a little dot.

An accompanying story on this subject appears on LaMarotte here. I was incensed, and on Ghulf Genes I prefer to maintain a higher level of decorum, if that’s the word to use. At the same time, WordPress, which is LaMarotte’s platform, does not permit me to embed a map.

Statistical Fronts

Ah for the halcyon days [see below] when we could track on maps the progress of our victorious armies advancing on foreign soil to their inevitable victory at last. In these latter days we’ve substituted statistical fronts for lines that mark territorial gains. The earliest signs of the new definition began to appear during the Vietnam war. In that time we started hearing about body counts, and the bad news could also be recorded by counting body bags shipped overseas empty and returned to these shores filled. The perfection of this new front began in earnest in Iraq and continues now in Afghanistan. And all this, of course, is the welcome sign of our growing sophistication in every possible category of the meaningful, not least in armed conflict. With unmanned (or should I, with more sophistication, call it unpresonned) drones we have now achieved some likeness to Zeus who, sending dread bolts from on high can kill with zigzagging laser beams at random. This means that we can be anywhere and nowhere—much as our mythical opponent who is both alive and dead, invisible but sometimes heard, and whose voice we analyze deploying fervent and pious hermeneutics by using ultra-modern sound equipment. In this sort of environment, actual territorial gains, dated concepts like pacification and control, and obsolete notions like victory are inappropriate. Instead we use the probabilistic approaches offered to us by higher math to calculate on computers whether or not we’re succeeding or just approaching success. Failure is also a non-starter, and even if we do approach suboptimal outcomes, we have a more sophisticated language to describe it. This came to mind as my eyes encountered the following headline in the New York Times this morning: TOP U.S. COMMANDER SEES PROGRESS IN AFGHANISTAN. I wondered what General McChrystal could possibly be seeing. Then it dawned on me. Numbers and graphs. Yes. Numbers and graphs.

Rule of Law?

A headline in the most recent Christian Science Monitor (CSM, 11/1/09) suggested the following line of thought. The headline says “Afghan election chaos may boost rule of law.”

The strict meaning of that phrase is that the laws have universal applicability to all people under it, thus not just the ordinary people but also the wealthy, the powerful, and the ruler himself. The author’s premise is that American pressure to roll back a fraudulent election teaches Hamid Karzai that the laws of Afghanistan (they forbid ballot stuffing) apply to him as well. Nice try, CSM. The article attributes the nullification of the recent election to two internal election bodies and “the world’s elder statesmen.” I don’t really think that the media should serve the public baby food, and the use of phrasing like “elder statesmen” suggests something far removed from reality. When someone says “the world’s elder statesmen,” I picture Jimmy Carter and other revered but powerless individuals. This election was overturned because the U.S. government signaled to Karzai that it would not support him, either with troops or, more importantly, with money. Why? Public opinion would turn against the administration. The administration’s own precious rear was too close to the fire.

Karzai is in power because U.S. funds flow through his hands. These moneys next buy the services of the Afghanistani war lords beneath thick tables that hide the transactions fairly effectively from common view—certainly from the view presented by CSM and other media, which always speak of corruption as present only on the Afghan side. But the truth of the matter is that this corruption must be funded. There are only two sources of money in Afghanistan.

One of these is opium. The Taliban control the opium, but the money to buy it comes, in this order, from Europe, Russia, China, Africa, and the US and Canada—to name the top five markets. More than 20 percent of opium is consumed in North America. The source of this is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); I saw the story here. This means that the Taliban are supported by the drug trade of the rest of the world.

The other source of money is the U.S. taxpayer. This money supports the U.S. military effort, the half-cooked build-up of an Afghan national army and police (why is it still not effective?), and funds the war lords. It’s not as if U.S. paymasters were riding around in helicopters handing over bundles of dollars to war lords in ceremonies—but they might as well. The job, however, is left to Karzai & Company, meaning his family members and friends. The war lords keep the U.S. forward operations and convoys relatively safe. You can acquire more details about this subject here, one of the articles published by AntiWar.com. Ideological reflex may cause you either to embrace or to reject that message, but either reaction is also childish behavior. Just ponder the facts.

But here is the question I ask: What is wrong with the following CSM paragraph?

For years, the international community has ineffectually hectored Karzai for reforms such as sharing more power with parliament, electing governors rather than rotating around his cronies, and ending deals with warlords.

What this paragraph leaves unsaid is that one of the two sources of local power in Afghanistan is the war lord. The other is the Taliban. That famed Loya Jirga that formed the Afghan government was drawn from Afghanistan’s tribes. Those tribes are ruled by war lords. There is no third party in Afghanistan, no genuinely organized “we the people” that stands over against the Taliban and the war lords both. That third force is a figment of Western imagination. Real power in Afghanistan has always been tribal, and “war lord” is just the west’s denigrating label for “tribal leader.”

The paragraph also fails even to hint at other illuminating facts. One: After the Russians were defeated, a civil war began. In that civil war the Taliban fought, defeated, marginalized, and drove the war lords, their enemies, to the edges of Afghanistan, thus to regions bordering the former U.S.S.R. I recall staring at successive maps showing the war lords’ retreat. Two: When the U.S. arrived in Afghanistan hell-bent on defeating Al Qaida, aka Osama Bin Laden, aka son-in-law of Omar, the leading figure of the Taliban, the U.S. forces immediately armed, equipped, and fueled the war lords in order to deploy them, once again, against the Taliban. U.S. taxpayer dollars are still funding this faction.

My chief points here are that the media may present most of the facts, but the interpretation they supply does not match Afghanistan’s realities.  The various attempts to build the institutional framework of a republican style government are vain and symbolic gestures that lack a genuine grounding in on-the-ground reality. Republican style governments demand the presence of a strong, organized, and extensive middle class. There is no such class in Afghanistan. What Afghanistan does have is the early stages of a feudal order. These are dominated by dukes (another good word for war lord, derived as the word is from the Latin dux, which used to mean general or military leader; after the central power fell, these dukes became local sovereigns).

Another important point is that Karzai became president precisely because he was not one of the war lords. He was a well-connected operator from the yet-to-be-fully-developed merchant class on whom the dukes of Afghanistan could agree—and who was also acceptable to the invading kingdom (in local eyes) of America. There is no point in hectoring a hammer. You have to hector the hammer’s wielder.

Someone who introduces the notion of “rule of law” into this discussion is either naïve or is patronizing the reading public. We must teach history properly so that we can recognize recurring patterns on the ground. This sort of reportage reminds me of the soothing explanation a little child might receive when it inadvertently walks in on mom and dad as they are engaged in the marital act. “Don’t cry, honey! Mom and dad were just playing. We were wrestling…”

The Answer?

I do not know the language of Pashtuns
Nor can I hum Afghanistani tunes
I’m also insufficient in Urdu
With towel-heads I don’t know who is who
Have never ever opened a Koran
The Arab tongue is stranger than FORTRAN
I live in forts behind high wire rolls
And venture forth from there pursuing goals—
The nation-building, military kind—
While satellites guard my exposed behind.
But Taliban are growing stronger still
They’re there and peer at me from every hill.
The answer to this little prob might be:
Send forty thou more of the likes of me.

Remembering Najibulla

My perspective is that of a person who was born in a small country that still called itself a monarchy then (1930s) and was ruled by a regent—although we did have a parliament. I was raised in an awareness of a unique national heritage (whether true or not), in a military family (think unenlightened), and in a Catholic culture (read backward). To be sure the heritage on my mother’s side of the family was modern—my mother was a token evangelical but did not believe any of that; she came from three generations of physicians; my grandfather was a Freemason, which in Europe meant atheist. On that side of the family dislike of all hierarchies was palpable, and I had it with my mother’s milk. But why all this? I think we absorb our values through experience rather than reasoning; we taste and judge the flavor of reality and incorporate that which we feel is genuine. My own general reaction to the world was and is shaped by this background. It was complex; the traditional element had very deep roots and the modernism I imbibed was passionate and fervent—as my mother felt it. And it is this combination that makes me look into the past and into the distance as yet another staged drama unfolds in far-away Afghanistan.

From my perspective any change in government, no matter what form it takes, is illegitimate if it takes place in the presence of an occupying military, no matter how that military, or its masters, interpret their own presence. For this very reason, now—now again—as also during the days when Hamid Karzai was first elected president, I once more evoke the memory of Mohammad Najibulla, the last puppet master appointed over the Afghanistanis, that time by the Soviet Union.

Najibulla was born in 1947 and died after being tortured in 1996. After a brief life, he’d plumb run out of patrons. The Soviets had abandoned him, the UN couldn’t be bothered to save him, and this own people—at last left sufficiently to their own devices to fashion their own real government—did not wish to be ruled by a representative of modernity’s most recent spawn, the communist variety. So they did away with him in a brutal manner, to be sure, but in these situations brutality is almost incidental.

There will always be ambitious individuals who, like Najibulla and Karzai, lend their energies to the “nation building” impulse of some external power which intends to impose its will on the organic formations of humanity when these latter interfere with the imperial will. If the geography favors the locals—as it certainly does those in Afghanistan—the careers of these Quislings tend to end badly.

By happenstance Brigitte and I are watching, courtesy of Netflix, the John Adams series produced by HBO in which the period of convulsions that marked the foundation of our nation are the background. What an irony that people are watching this series while the latter-day descendants of those revolutionaries try to impose our cookie cutters over what isn’t even remotely a “dough” in the Hindu Kush. And no one, apparently, sees this irony. Vision, evidently, benefits from getting an “unenlightened” and “backward” education.

Afghanistan in Context

Fifty years ago, as a young man in the U.S. Army in Europe, I first learned about Kashmir. My education has always taken novel forms. It proceeded by bumps, exposures, and absorptions. Ten years before that time, for instance, I’d learned about Korea when listening to some inspirational readings—about the labors of brave missionaries—at Konvikt Sankt Bernhard, a Catholic boarding school in Germany. Every day, at the noon meal, someone read out loud for about fifteen minutes until our principal said “Satis”; thus I also learned what Romans said when they meant to say “Enough.” Five years before that time, I learned about the Sufis when my mother threw up her hands and cried: “Stop it! Stop dancing like a wild Dervish.” Anyway, I learned about Kashmir because the deputy commander of our unit, a lieutenant colonel, was taking classes offered by the University of Maryland; so was I. He had to write a paper and asked me to help him shape its English; he provided the content. Editing the stiff text, I learned about Kashmir. Fifty years ago.

The memory surfaced today as I noted in the New York Times that Pakistan objects to U.S. actions in Afghanistan, against the Taliban, which causes Pakistan problems of insurgency inside the country, forcing it to pull back troops from its borders with India, not least borders with parts of Kashmir. The Pakistanis, evidently, are much more concerned about India than worried about terrorism by virtual cousins, you might say, which the Taliban certainly are.

Pakistan itself is just 62 years old, dating from the partition of India into two Muslim enclaves (Pakistan and East Bengal) and India proper. That took place in 1947, followed by chaotic upheavals and the kinds of half-forced and half-voluntary migrations we’ve come to call ethnic cleansing—as Hindus moved south and east and Muslims went north and west. No sooner separated, Pakistan and India fell out over Kashmir, a mostly Muslim princedom that Pakistan began to infiltrate when its ruler did not opt to join the Dominion of Pakistan. Kashmir’s northern areas are ruled by Pakistan, its southern reaches by India, and high tension has stiffened the air above this region ever since 1947, wars between Pakistan and India erupting in 1965 and again in 1999. As for East Bengal, a part of Pakistan after the partition and renamed East Pakistan, it eventually broke away and became Bangladesh. In that conflict, as well as in all of the others that surrounded the partition, many thousands of people perished.

This entire region, including large areas of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan, have an honorably violent history in which two cultures (Muslim and Hindu) have been clashing ever since Muslim invasions from the North began in 1206. Islamic sultanates eventually conquered all of the Indian subcontinent in the Mughal period (early sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century).

We are now bogged down on the northern fringes of this region under the strange illusion that controlling Afghanistan—a mostly stony, rocky, mountainous, dirt-poor, and barbaric region of the world, that no empire has ever effectively managed to control—will secure us from terrorism. In this process we’re ignoring the vast sweep of history. We’re projecting our own values and assumptions on this region and naively believe that democratic forms will not only take root there but magically transform a region in habits and history altogether alien to ours.

And fifty years from now? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some earnest colonel in 2059 will still be using his spare time to improve himself by learning something about Kashmir. Or Bangladesh. Or the geography of the Khyber Pass.
--------------------
Maps are from the CIA World Factbook, an old friend, you might say.

This Conquest May Be Hazardous to Your Culture

Flet victus, victor interiit. The conquered mourns, the conqueror’s undone.
[Roman proverb]

When this old saw is carefully unpacked, a task historians routinely accomplish long after each major upheaval, it turns out that conquerors are transformed by their victories and the culture of the conquered ultimately triumphs. We speak of a Graeco-Roman culture because Rome conquered Greece in a contest that extended over fifty-five years and ended in 146 BC. In the wake of that conquest wave after wave of Hellenistic culture transformed Rome permanently. And we, mostly descendants of the barbarians who, in the late and morbid stages of the Roman Imperium, invaded and conquered Italy, absorbed its superior culture and became its inheritors by a kind of osmosis.

Remembering this sort of thing is unavoidable for folks like me who grew up head down over big thick books—and our minds filled with the nightmare from which James Joyce tried to awaken—when we note the preparations for withdrawal from Shiite Iraq just as we step up our efforts to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A while back now I read a book entitled What Is Life? written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in which the authors present the fascinating hypothesis that evolution proceeded in part by creature eating creature, thus by conquest, as it were. To be sure, this was not the only mechanism of change, but it is thought to be one. Ingested creatures, if small enough, may find a new home inside their eater and sink anchor into the alien soil and turn into symbionts. My own earlier excursions into the nightmare of biology (echoing Joyce) had prepared me to accept this. The presence in the cell of mitochondria, little structures with their own DNA and reproductive cycles, little oxygen-generating power plants that supply the cell’s energy, seemed to say that cells have immigrants who came from elsewhere.

Other examples from a larger scale aren’t hard to find. In the New York Times the other day (June 30, 2009) is a brief story headlined When a Hybrid Takes Hold, The Outcome Can be Bad. Hybridization. The story deals with a new hybrid salamander produced in Salinas Valley in California when barred tiger salamanders, brought to the region from Texas by bait dealers, escaped and began to mate with the native California tiger salamanders. The resulting larvae, which are the food of the California newt and the Pacific chorus frog, were radically different and nearly did in all the frogs. New hybrids are sometimes indigestible, and not just in this case.

This, in turn, reminds me of “as above, so below”—which might be extended to say, “and in the middle too.” If we don’t want our culture to change, therefore, we must avoid both conquest and absorption—and we mustn’t mate with folks our parents don’t approve of. Good luck…