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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.
John Chuckman lives in Canada.
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