The Nonsense
Of Nation-Building
In Afghanistan
By John Chuckman
11 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Nation-building
is a term created by people living off Pentagon contracts. It is one
of those queasy political expressions with no hard meaning yet its use
raises few eyebrows. The term sounds as though it means something, and
it is treated as though it were something you might study. At least
this is true in the United States where people are hypnotized by hype
and substance-lacking words, where inflating nothing into something
is an everyday art.
To understand what absurdity the term disguises,
conduct a brief thought-experiment and think about just one aspect of
social behavior in North America and about how long it takes to change.
Cigarette smoking was very stylish fifty years ago, and it has taken
all those fifty years, despite scientific information providing many
warnings, to change public acceptance of smoking.
In 19th century America, chewing tobacco and spitting
were obsessions, observed and recorded by many disturbed European visitors.
Spittoons graced the halls and lobbies of every public building, standing
in ripples of warm brown carpet stains where the efforts of the less
skilled were recorded. Eventually, this hideous practice ended, but
it took a very long time.
So how much greater would be the task of altering
the most fundamental attitudes and practices in a society? Could even
ten years of costly effort by thousands hope to make even a small dent
in the practices of an ancient society of twenty million people?
Much of Afghanistan lives as though it were still
the 14th century, and this is the case any place where there has been
little economic growth for centuries, where people grow up doing pretty
much exactly what their parents do.
In Western society of the 14th century, it was
perfectly acceptable for men to go off to war, leaving their mates locked
in rude iron "chastity belts" with padlocks for years at a
time. In Western society of the 14th century, it was common practice
among powerful families to contract a 12-year old girl to marriage.
Is the practice of women wearing the bourka in Afghanistan somehow more
primitive than the past customs of Europe?
I take the bourka as an example only because a
great many words were spent both before and after the invasion about
the status of women in Iraq. Most of this was sheer hypocrisy, propaganda
aimed at influencing the attitudes of America’s middle class in
favor of war. As I’ve written many times, truth makes the best
propaganda – it’s all a matter of twisting emphasis and
context. Today, outside the city of Kabul, almost all women still wear
the bourka, and it has nothing to do with threats from the Taleban.
Even in Kabul half the women wear it.
The distinction between Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan
is important, because the effective reach of Afghanistan’s president
has been compared to that of a Mayor of Kabul. Most people in Afghanistan
live under the effective rule of warlords whose only merit may be that
they are opponents of the Taleban. In every other respect, they are
indistinguishable from the Taleban. They hate seeing women without bourkas.
They do not like girls going to public school. They do not believe in
democracy – who did in Europe in the 14th century? – and
they reject modern concepts of human rights.
The warlords, at least some of them, finance their
satrapies with the proceeds of poppy crops, causing an explosion in
the world’s supply of high-grade heroin, the Taleban, for all
their unpleasant qualities, having previously ended this trade. The
warlords are torturers and murderers, and their militias are capable
of almost any horror you can imagine, some having conducted mass rapes
according to numerous witnesses.
Yet the warlords cannot be removed. They were an
integral part of the American strategy for invading Afghanistan, and
they remain pillars of the existing state. America’s strategy
consisted of bombing the Taleban and their supporters while warlord
militias did most of the dirty work on the ground. America sent in thousands
of special forces to search the mountains for Osama bin Laden and remnant
Taleban bands, but for the most part they have been no more successful
than the Russians were years ago. They have been successful in alienating
and insulting many villagers with their tactics of bursting in with
guns and grenades firing.
Apart from having killed thousands with bombs and
mines, this is pretty much the sum total of America’s achievement
in Afghanistan. The Russians actually had done a better job of making
secular changes, especially for women, but this was ignored in American
propaganda to win support for the CIA’s costly mujahideen-proxy
war, the war that gave us figures like Osama bin Laden and led to the
eventual rule of the Taleban.
A Canadian officer in Afghanistan recently was
gravely injured when a young man attacked him with a home-made ax. The
officer had removed his helmet out of respect towards the village elders
to whom he was talking. The young Afghan man was immediately killed
by other Canadian soldiers. Newspapers typically reported his age as
maybe 20. In fact, it turns out he was only 16. A brief exchange of
gun fire with some others who produced weapons then occurred.
The incident provides something of a parable for
the entire misadventure in Afghanistan. First, the soldier was right
to remove his helmet. You can’t get far in a society like Afghanistan
without showing respect.
Second, a young man of just 16 was determined to
take the life of a foreigner despite his lack of a suitable weapon and
despite the likelihood of his sacrificing his life.
Third, because it was a small village, there is
no possibility that the elders who were gathered were not aware of the
impending assault. They kept silent and allowed it to happen.
Fourth, one of the reactions to the assault has
been for Canadian officials to re-examine their practices, things like
a soldier removing his helmet. Yet how can they hope to be sympathetically
listened to otherwise? The alternative is to follow America’s
apish tactics, creating even more bitter enemies. It is an unavoidable
vicious circle.
Canadians and others find themselves in Afghanistan
because a brutal American administration, in the wake of 9/11, instead
of using diplomatic and legal powers to capture Osama and the boys,
pressured everyone to support an invasion. Canada was later able to
resist pressure for the even more pointless and destructive invasion
of Iraq. Canadians today are asking what is the purpose of the mission
in Afghanistan. The answers offered include that empty term, nation-building.