An American Lion

The War in Afghanistan is a Napoleonic Folly

The problem with thinking that we can “surge” troops into Afghanistan and have it turn out like Iraq is wrong because of one simple fact: there’s no government in Afghanistan. There is no civil service there, at least, not in large enough numbers or in enough places to be seen as indispensable to daily life. The people of Afghanistan do what they do in spite of a government, not because of it. There are few skilled medical people. There are virtually no educators. There’s an absence of organized society. Perpetual war has seen to that.

What allowed the Taliban to thrive was the absolute lack of anyone with enough education to see through the Medieval ideology of that particular strain of backwards-looking Islam. There are only a handful of people who know how to run things, and even that is at a very basic level. There is little or no education or literacy to be found. People subsist doing whatever they can. Professions are rare. Stability is also rare.

We tend to forget that Iraq was a relatively modern, highly educated, somewhat secular, and thus very professionalized country with academics and professional people. There was a culture to build upon, in other words, and what America tried to build upon resisted what we had to offer. What makes Iraq’s road back to normalcy so hard is that everyone with talent has fled or has been displaced internally. In Afghanistan, what few people there once were with any talent whatsoever have either fled or were killed. The difference is, you can make a policeman or a bureaucratic flunkie or a sewage plant worker out of what’s left in Iraq. In Afghanistan, you don’t even have that. Think of Iraq starting at mid-field and having to go fifty yards for a touchdown. Think of Afghanistan as not even being in the stadium or even caring about scoring.

And yet, the Kagans write their drivel:

The recent American experience in Iraq illustrates how U.S. forces and diplomacy helped correct the behaviors of a sometimes malign government in ways that helped neutralize insurgent groups. In early 2007, many Iraqi leaders were using instruments of state to support sectarian death squads. The dysfunctional government could not secure the population, pass laws or provide services to its people. The implementation of a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy — enabled by the deployment of nearly six additional U.S. combat brigades — transformed Iraq’s government within 18 months. Opponents of the surge argued that Iraqis would “step up” politically and militarily only if they knew that U.S. forces would leave. Instead, before committing to the fight, political leaders and populations throughout Iraq assessed whether U.S. forces would stay long enough to secure them. Iraqis stepped up precisely because of the absence of conditionality and time limits on U.S. force levels.

If the Afghan government were fully legitimate, there would be no insurgency. U.S. and international actions must aim to improve the Afghan government’s ability to provide basic services such as security and dispute resolution nationwide, building the legitimacy of the government in Kabul sufficiently to dampen a large-scale insurgency. They must persuade and even compel Afghan leaders to stop activities that alienate the people and create fertile ground for insurgents.

Adding American forces in large numbers would help. It is critical that the Afghan people be provided security. Continuous violence, insurgent intimidation and propaganda campaigns create a pervasive sense of insecurity that undermines the government. As we have seen in Iraq and some parts of Afghanistan, a reduction in violence can slow or stop the erosion of the government’s legitimacy. It can also create space in which to resolve underlying tensions that had fueled the violence, through negotiation or the construction of more effective governmental structures, neither of which can occur without security.

But American military forces also contribute directly to efforts to improve Afghan institutions. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, international troops will partner with army and police units. Afghan forces can learn by listening to the exhortations of mentors and by seeing the world’s best military perform those tasks. Partnered American units also hinder illegal activities, such as extortion, that Afghan units might otherwise undertake.

That’s all well and good, but the raw materials of a functioning society were present in Iraq. They’re not present in Afghanistan.

Let’s take a trip back in time, to four years ago, and let’s see if you can see if I’ve made my point here:

Richard examines his map and realizes the helicopters have put his force at a different landing zone than the one he thought. The village he is supposed to clear is due east. It’s time to pick up and move. Richard tries one last time to elicit information from the locals gathering around his men.

“Is there Taliban in that village,” he asks. “No, no,” say the villagers through the interpreter. A sardonic smile spreads across the face of one of the ANA soldiers. “Bull——” he whispers in English.

[…]

“Here’s the difference between us and the Taliban,” Richard tells a group of men gathered in the shade of almond trees in the next village, equally poor and with little evidence of having absorbed any of the world’s technological advances since the 18th century. “When we come to a village and you say you don’t want us, we don’t try to harm you or kill you. The Taliban does.”

He points out that the advantages, such as construction of schools and infrastructure, of cooperating with coalition forces.

“The next time the Taliban come here, you tell them they should probably leave your village, because we’re going to kill them. Tell them the only chance they have to live is if they help out the new government and the ANA.”

A man in a white skull cap explains that the Taliban will come in the night, bang on the door and say, “We are 10 guys — give us food,” and if the villagers refuse, they get beaten or shot. “The only way we’re going to make your country stronger is if you don’t give the Taliban sanctuary in your village,” Richard replies. He tells them to report Taliban activities at the police station in Akhtar, 10 miles to the west.

Then Richard addresses the half-dozen young boys among his audience. He explains the benefits of helping the Americans. In Khakeran, he said, he built a school so that local children could be educated.

“I hired four teachers and 200 children go to school every day in a place where the Taliban took away their school,” he said. The words have resonance here. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai created a small school for the children of these villagers, but the Taliban burned it down last year.

“We’ll bring food here [in winter] if I start hearing from this village. But if you don’t go there [to Akhtar], and I hear the Taliban have been here every 10 or 15 days, I’m gonna think you like the Taliban and I’m not gonna give you anything. Â… Stop making excuses about how they’re gonna come and kill you and do something about it,” Richard said.

Sitting quietly off to the side is 1st Sgt. Noor Ulwahid Safie, the senior ANA man on the patrol. Unlike most of his men, all but one of whom are armed with AKs, he carries a Dragunov sniper rifle, to which he affixes a bayonet in the shade of a stunted tree. A Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province, he grew up as a refugee in Peshawar, Pakistan, where he attended a madrassa for seven years in the 1980s. As a boy, he was exposed to the Pakistan Army and decided to join if ever there was an equivalent army for Afghanistan.

He returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s, worked as a shopkeeper and got married. He worked for a couple of years as a policeman. He has been a soldier for only 11 months. Safie talks quietly with the locals. He writes a letter for them to bring when they report Taliban activity to the police or the ANA. The letter said the villagers here have a very low standard of living, and asks the recipient to do something to improve their lives. Safie signs the letter and hands it to a village elder.

Nobody gets it.

Here it is, over four years later, and we still do not know our enemy in Afghanistan. Who was it, really, who burned down the school? Was it the Taliban? Or was it someone who was afraid of what the school might bring? A local population that wants a school can protect it, replace it, and house it if it comes under attack. A fatalistic society that doesn’t care will shrug when a school put there by Western forces gets burned to the ground. Did they want that school? Or did they put up with that school?

The Kagans write like we can simply transplant our values and force others to be like us at the point of a gun. In Iraq, which had a taste of modernization and literacy under Saddam, certain aspects of what we tried to do succeeded. In Afghanistan, there has been no similar adoption of Western ideas or practices like education. We think that we can bluster and cajole and threaten these people, but they are frozen in time. We can bomb them from the air but we can’t build roads. We can kill them by remote control but we can’t protect them from a popular insurgency. We can’t put three million soldiers on the ground and protect every village nor do we get that the Taliban are the popular will of the people—the “bad guys” routine outlined above is ridiculous. There’s Taliban in every village, amongst the males who resist the popular will of a distant, corrupt government that does nothing for them and the occasional presence of U.S. or NATO forces. Our technology means virtually nothing. Our efforts are well-intentioned, but there’s nothing to build upon.

The people of Afghanistan live their lives as if we’ll be gone tomorrow because that’s the only thing they know. What do they care about schools when they don’t even know if they’re going to eat today?

What we have, then, is a continuation of a Napoleonic Folly, a blustering, hubris-driven belief that we can beat anyone and everyone without worrying about the details.

Juan Cole illustrates this:

Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.

That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and — with how-to-do-it examples all around them — began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.

Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte’s army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it — the British Navy.

In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military — as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s — is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas’ social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.

From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics — and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)

For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush’s boast that, with “new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians,” now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.

It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte’s failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush’s neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable.

Substitute Obama for Bush because nothing has changed. Tomorrow, President Obama is going to give a speech that President Bush could have given two years ago. The problem is, this country will swallow it like candy because it will be sold to them by a much better salesman. It’s still the same overpriced timeshare in Boca with a rat infestation and meth dealers for neighbors.

The same man runs the Department of Defense. The same generals run the operation, some with brand new stars bequeathed by a gullible administration eager to defend itself from right-wing critics who have no credibility. The policies haven’t changed, the wrong-headed thinking hasn’t changed, and the reality of what we face in Afghanistan hasn’t changed, either. The problem is, too many liberals are still too enamored of this pretty man and his fanstastic speeches, and they haven’t bothered to note that we still use helicopters to put U.S. troops in villages we can’t protect to tell the locals to stop supporting the Taliban, and yet, the Taliban thrive. And yet, the foreign invaders keep coming. And yet, we keep building schools, thinking that will solve everything.