Should We Leave Afghanistan?

Time for more controversy. I have been thinking about Afghanistan for some time now, and I’m seriously starting to doubt the wisdom of staying. Unfortunately, I do not believe that our current strategy (or any strategy that we would employ) can succeed because our policies are promised on fallacies. If we don't reconsider our premises and change our strategy accordingly, we need to stop endanger any more American lives.

Before I delve into this issue, let me be clear -- this is not about Obama. I don’t believe that Obama is doing anything significantly different than Bush did or than McCain would have done. And in all honestly, it is difficult to fault him for doing what the entire establishment advocates.

Secondly, I do not think going into Afghanistan was a mistake. Far from it, it was a necessary act. Al Qaeda, a terrorist group bent on the death or forced conversion of all non-Muslims, was using Afghanistan as a base of operations against the United States. They had direct ties within the government itself and were using Afghan territory to train and equip terrorists who would attack the United States and other Western countries. Destroying that ability was the key reason to go into Afghanistan, and it was a worthwhile goal.

So what's the problem? The problem is that there is no exit strategy. . . there can be no exit strategy under our current thinking. And that is because we are working under the illusion that Afghanistan is a country. Every strategy put forward by the left or right begins with this assumption, and it is faulty.

Afghanistan the country is a fiction, like many countries in that part of the world. When the British arrived during their empire building phase, they found thousands of small fiefdoms, each ruled by a local prince or potentate. The British co-opted or conquered them all. When the British left, they drew arbitrary lines that bound groups of these fiefdoms into single countries. These new countries lumped together different ethnic groups, tribes, clans and religions, each of whom hated the others, and they’ve been fighting ever since.

Afghanistan is a collection of different ethnic tribes (see map above). They do not get along. They will form alliances with other tribes where it is in their interest, but they break those alliances the moment their interests change. They have no common beliefs to hold them together. To the contrary, they hold many ancient grudges that tear them apart. And even apart from the grudges, the influence of Iran and Pakistan tear the country apart.

Yet, all of our strategies assume not only that this collection of waring tribes can be turned into a single country if we only impose a democracy. But there is nothing about Afghanistan that tells me that they are ready for democracy.

And this is the core of the problem. Liberals and neocons naively believe that the rest of the world is “just like us, waiting to happen.” All we need to do is stick a ballot box under their noses, find a George Washington proxy, and they will suddenly become committed democrats. But that’s simply not true. There are people in this world who worship strength, who find lying to be an acceptable form of behavior, and who savor revenge for grievances that began thousands of years before they were born. These societies function on the same level as a fifth grade schoolyard. . . power is privilege.

From ethnic cleansing/revenge in the Balkans, to ethnic slaughters in Rwanda (and a half dozen other African countries), to the anti-Christian genocides in places like Somalia and Sudan, to clan on clan violence throughout the Middle East, the evidence is clear -- the Western model of civility and constitutional democracy is the outlier.

It took us 2000 years to get to the point where we are. Two thousand years to develop a legal system that prizes truth and clear rules. Two thousand years of overthrowing dictators for us to learn how to govern without force and accept rule of law. Two thousand years of church, and state, and educational institutions, and culture working together to instill in us the beliefs that are needed for a democracy to work. And even now, those beliefs are precariously balanced and sometimes fail us.

Afghanistan has no history akin to ours. They have no real educational system, and no culture of freedom or democracy. They have no shining government to look up to, no history of increasing freedoms. They have no independent courts. And, ominously, they have a religion that preaches hate and division, not unity and peace. For all practical purposes, it is a society of feral children grown old, all suffering from stunted intellectual and emotional growth.

There is nothing about Afghanistan (or anywhere else in the world) that tells me that democracy can be imposed by outsiders where it does not have strong roots already. Their culture is destructive and is simply not suited for any form of cooperative government. Yes, we can create a pretend democracy as long as we occupy the country. But the moment we leave, they will revert to their natural instincts. Thus, our plans to create a stable Afghanistan by imposing a democracy on these people are doomed to fail. The moment we leave, everything will evaporate.

Indeed, unless we impose democratic values on the Afghan people, any democracy we create will be a hoax. And therein lies the rub. Not only do I doubt that it is possible to impose such values on a backward people, but our policy makers would never even attempt it. To achieve that, we would need to reform their government, their educational system, their culture, and their religion, much like we did in Japan, and that would need to be imposed upon them. But that would make us “cultural imperialists,” and it would bring immediate cries that this is a war against Islam. This is unacceptable to our policy makers.

That leaves us with only one other viable strategy. Break Afghanistan into parts along ethnic lines (like what solved the Yugoslavia problem), and install favored strongmen in each enclave to ensure stability. But our policy makers won’t do this either because they can’t stomach the idea of abandoning the fiction that Afghanistan is a country. . . not to mention they refuse to be seen supporting dictators or warlords. So we are an impasse.

Thus, rather than correcting our strategy, we keep muddling through with the current strategy, hoping that somehow the house of cards we call the Afghan government suddenly morphs into a creature so wonderful that the Afghan people skip over 2000 years of cultural development, abandon everything they truly believe, and suddenly fall deeply in love with the concepts of democracy, rule of law, and clean government.

I see this as a fool’s errand.

Thus, I also question the desire to send more soldiers to Afghanistan. We are told they are needed to control the country (we’ve given up on the idea of destroying the Taliban) until the Afghan government and military can stand on their own feet. But the government will never stand on its own feet without a Western army to prop it up, and the Afghan army suffers the same lack of cohesion as the country. Indeed, they are beset with ethnic tensions, they are not trusted in most parts of the country, and they suffer a desertion rate in excess of 20%. And this is after we spent billions of dollars training them since 2002 -- a longer period, by the way, than World War II lasted from start to finish (1939-1945).

It strikes me that it’s time to face reality. There is no point to wasting American lives trying to prop up a government that will evaporate the second we leave. We either need to seriously remake their society from top to bottom, or we should admit that Afghanistan is a fiction and set about creating smaller, more stable fiefdoms and pairing them off with larger partners (like Pakistan or Iran) to keep the Taliban from returning. If we won't do that, then I don't think we should risk another American life.

At least, that’s how I’m see it.