Afghanistan has three wars at once. Let’s fight the right one.
By Douglas A. Ollivant, Published: May 20
“There is not one war in Afghanistan. There are three.
“First, there is the fight against al-Qaeda and related terrorist groups. Second is the war to protect and support the fledgling Afghan government against the Taliban insurgency. The third war is the least understood but the most enduring: the internal social and cultural battle between the urban modernizers of Afghanistan mostly based in Kabul and the rural, tribal, anti-modern peoples who live in the country’s inaccessible mountain regions...”
“The strategy of Campbell and the regional command’s senior civilian representative, Tom Gibbons, provides the proper model. In July, Campbell and Gibbons published a concept for a “district reinforcement program.” It pushed U.S. troops, money and attention to key district centers along the roads connecting the major cities in eastern Afghanistan. These efforts were intended to connect Kabul with traditionally tributary cities — Jalalabad, Asadabad, Ghazniand Gardez — and create a safe zone at each district center where police and civil servants could be trained, where commerce could thrive and where solar power plus cellphone and Internet connectivity could help build infrastructure. Though obtaining proper resources has been a struggle, the effort is bearing fruit in many such districts.”
Douglas Ollivant, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, has served in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the National Security Council for the Bush and Obama administrations. He is now a senior fellow in national security studies at the New America Foundation.
Cassi Creek:
Ollivant has laid out the main problem in Afghanistan and the region. Among the existing populations, there are those that have no desire to modernize. They have remained in the remote regions of these nations because they want no interference from any type of authority in their lives. They will not change their cultures under any amount of duress.
We’ve finally accomplished our initial goal in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is dead and his coven scattered. Any troops tasked to this mission should be brought home immediately. The government of Afghanistan is never going to be the government we would prefer. Nor will its military forces. Both are shot through with corruption and ineptitude that we cannot “train” out of them. Troops tasked to this mission, retraining and modernizing a civil and military component are wasting their time. Bring them home immediately. Bring their organic equipment with them. Nothing usable or recyclable should be left behind.
The third war reminds me of the strategic hamlet concept used in VietNam. Establishing a sequence of armed way stations to stage convoys from while maintaining some semblance of civil authority at the hands of the a supposedly loyal military, is not going to turn out any differently now in Afghanistan than it did then in VietNam. However much we wish to believe that our system of government is ideal for all other nations, we need to face the reality that not all nations wish to be copies of the U.S. Further examination reveals that despite the belief of the teavangelists, Christianity as practiced by the American right wing evangelicals is neither ideal for nor sought after by much of the world’s population.
The third war will not be won by the forces of modernization. If it is won at all, it will be won by slow erosion of traditional culture by the leakage of such ideas as education for females, personal rights for women, modern health care, trickling into the remote villages. And such ideas must be accompanied by some long over-due form of Islamic reformation. Because old tribal cultures seldom if ever vanish peacefully when confronted with internal threats to daily life and leaders, the changes, if they occur at all will be tortuously slow and bloody. The drive for reform will have to come from the women and they will pay dearly for it.
We cannot secure the changes for them; we cannot instill the demand for change into their lives and thoughts. We can only make it worse for them by trying to overlay our demands for cultural replacement onto an ages-old cultural map that they must learn to read for their selves.
So once again, bring the troops committed to cultural warfare home too. If we must send someone, send teachers to begin spreading literacy. Under no circumstances should any missionaries be allowed to enter carrying U.S. passports. They don’t belong there, to begin with, and if they carry passports from other nations, we have no reason to retrieve their bodies when they meet the inevitable and appropriate end.
No comments:
Post a Comment