If the United States was in a Facebook relationship with Afghanistan, it’s status would undoubtedly be the now infamous tagline: ‘It’s Complicated.’ I personally love that term- it covers all manner of dirty little sins and it’s a neat summation of the excruciatingly difficult foreign policy challenge facing the Obama Administration. If, kids, you thought Iraq was a maddening mess to untangle, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet when it comes to Afghanistan. Happily, the widespread fraud in the August Presidential Elections has forced the government of President Hamid Karzai to accept a runoff- which has bought the Obama Administration some time to ponder the options it faces in regards to cleaning up Afghanistan- none of which are palatable, none of which are good and none of which will solve the mess we currently find ourselves in.
I want to try and write about this because it's incredibly important- we're about to make the most important foreign policy decision of the new century and to be frank, not enough people are going to be paying attention- and too many people are going to be willing to believe whatever the media tells them. (More and more, I'm thinking that courses on media manipulation should be required at the elementary, high school and college levels. People have simply got to stop eating up the bullshit we get spoon-fed by the media.) The problem I'm finding is that the complexity of the situation doesn't make for very entertaining reading. So, please, gang- bear with me as I try to dissect this:
The infuriating difficulty of our foreign policy in the post 9-11 age is that the quality of regimes we support now matters more than the quantity. This is a fundamental change from the Cold War equation we had been working under- where containment of communism was an overriding national priority and the quantity of regimes in the world that would do our bidding mattered more to us than what policies they pursued. September the 11th proved conclusively that in the 21st Century, we cannot turn a blind eye to the potential shortcomings of any 'allies' we support out there. It is not just that we need allies in the Middle East- we need good ones, that won't oppress their people, who won't, in turn, resent us for bankrolling their oppressors.
The neo-conservative thesis of freedom, liberty, democracy and spreading the blessings of the United States of America is nauseating horse crap that belongs on a Hallmark Card instead of in serious foreign policy discussion. Whenever there's another war and some President, either Democrat or Republican spins us all some bullcrap about 'all the good we're doing' and 'liberating the oppressed people of Whachamacallitstan' don't believe it. Realism, although I can't stand it, holds true. Nations act in their long-term interests and nothing else-- and guess what, our long-term interests in the region have nothing to do with terrorism. No, gang, it's much, much more complicated than that: we have to discredit Islamism as a political force in the Middle East- and as a bonus, just because that won't be hard enough, we have to get the people of the Middle East to do it themselves- this change cannot be imposed from above or from the outside.
Kids, the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan weren't aimed at those countries specifically. Instead our real targets were Iran and Pakistan. Iran, because if the Ayatollah and all his merry men are forced from power, it will be a political earthquake the region hasn't seen since 1979, when the Ayatollahs took over Iran and Islamism became a serious political force in the region. Pakistan because we need to fundamentally alter Pakistan's state identity so that it's state institutions can function free of the need to co-opt Islamic fundamentalists for support.
Now do you see why this stuff is so complicated? In the long-term, George W. Bush (brace yourselves, my liberal friends) might just be remembered as a genius. I know that's probably hard for many people to accept right now, but it's true. The tiresome debates over how we got into Iraq and Afghanistan should end. I could care less, personally- and if you're an informed citizen, you shouldn't care either. The wars are what they are and we now have to craft a policy that will disentangle us while furthering our national interests (because that's what countries act on- none of this blessings of liberty or 'let freedom reign' crap, neo-cons. Puh-leez.) and not leaving a bigger mess behind. The real consequences of both invasions and both wars will not become clear for another decade at minimum. (This is why I come across as Republican to a lot of my more liberal friends-- not because I think Bush was necessarily right, but because I'm deferring judgment on his actions until the verdict is in. And it isn't yet. Where I tend to line up with my liberal friends is on his infuriating incompetence in prosecuting the war in Iraq. For that, I devoutly hope that he will be (metaphorically speaking) hanged from the yardarm of history when the dust settles.)
The ripple effects of Iraq should be obvious- once a competent (it took awhile, but we got one) war policy was decided upon, stabilization and relative security followed. This being a remnant of Dubya's foreign policy, it's fair to say that it could all go tits up at any time (hence my deferred judgement), but for now at least, Iraq is moving in the right direction. And look what happened in both Lebanon (with the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and a firm re-assertion of Lebanese sovereignty) and Iran (where the Ayatollah has alienated a whole generation of young people following the brutal crackdown in the wake of June's Presidential elections.) For the people of the region, seeing the messy birth of a functioning democratic state has got a lot of people thinking. And what that means is anyone's guess. (Hence, my deferred judgement!)
Afghanistan is even more messy, because none of the options under discussion are going to work. 45,000 more troops may indeed rollback the Taliban and give the Afghani government room to breathe, but until you can secure the border with Pakistan, it won't do a damn thing. The Taliban can (and probably will) run back across the border and keep right on fighting. The opposing school of thought (calling for a more surgical war directed primarily against Al-Qaeda) would be even more disastrous. Emboldening the Taliban is not the answer. If we run and scale down our war in Afghanistan, the government we've spent blood and money putting into place will fall. Pakistan (given the audacity of some of the recent attacks) will also be under threat (as they'll have no reason to stop co-opting and cooperating with Islamic Fundamentalists to act as a bulwark to the cohesiveness of their state itself.)
The real policy challenge confronting us then, is this: Pakistan is a completely artificial entity (there's never been a Pakistan before '47) and with the untimely death of Jinnah, it had no strong national leader to help formulate a coherent state identity about what exactly it means to be Pakistani, so one sort of had to be made up on the fly. An evil enemy to get people to rally around the flag (India), a Cold War superpower to give them a fancy military to defend the people from aforementioned ugly enemy (the United States) and what, kiddies, is the glue that holds it all together? That's right- Islam!
So how do you a convince a country whose state identity for the past fifty years has involved a closer and closer embrace of increasingly fundamentalist Islamic political forces to well, stop hugging so you can secure and stabilize the country next door and bring your troops home without an early (precipitous) and potentially disastrous withdrawal leaving chaos in your wake? (And oh, as a super-cool bonus, ending this 'embrace' will also keep a nuclear arsenal out of the hands of Islamic fundamentalists- something I think we can all agree would be a super-good thing.)
And kids, if you have an answer to the above problem, please let the President know as soon as possible. As for me, well, I've come to the following conclusion:
Eh, it's complicated.
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