Beyond Zinn
I think of myself as a Zinn kind of guy when it comes to war and conflict, but it struck me as a new low when I heard Trump was negotiating with the Taliban? I mean I don’t really know but what kind of negotiation? Uhn, OK you can keep the women but…
That said, when Biden announced the pullout my immediate sense was less war is good. I wasn’t thinking about the Taliban being in charge — like a lot of people, I had a vague sense of all those Afghan troops and eventually things returning to normal (e.g. no war). Obviously, I wasn’t thinking too deep on it.
Last thing (before I get to Smoler) when I realized what was happening — that we were turning it over to the Taliban, my first thought was OK, so they’re the government now, and they just beat, killed, detained some Americans? Let’s obliterate them!
So, I’ve gotten it wrong and gotten upset and haven’t been thinking and one of the things I hadn’t thought of was stalemate. I was sucked in by that “we couldn’t fix it in 20 years, what’s the point of continuing.”
What Smoler wrote, all things considered, and he does it seems to me, get to just about every difficult aspect of the problem, seems better than anything else I’ve heard.
The US dealings with drug lords, the fact (according to the NYT) that we haven’t done as well for the women of Afghanistan as reporting might have us think etc.
The idea that this is a “new Taliban” seems as counter-intuitive, and counter-historical to me as it does to Smoler, and he actually knows history. But in what seems a hopeless situation, the idea that international pressure, trade and support — might be something; maybe be the best we can hope given where we are.
And in today’s story of a US drone strike killing a bunch of innocents, maybe a little bit of that Zinn sense that whatever good you intend, with war, in the end it doesn’t work out.
Like Smoler, I did find that “not willing to fight for themselves” talk offensive and unnecessary.
I saw a headline about some Afghan resistance after the Taliban surge. Not very Zinn, I guess, but it was very appealing to me — I was thinking back to the First stories about some women resistance fighters (in Syria?), anyway, nothing more appealing than the idea of a local group of resistance fighters (in this case, women in particular) rounding them up and throwing them out.
Not very hopeful when I think about it, but running a country is different from seizing it, lots of ways to resist and the Afghan people (women in particular I imagine) have some experience…
I thought the piece was terrific, though with that odd feeling you get reading something very convincing which conclude that the situation is unsalvageable.
-Phil Greene
Stalemates
Fredric Smoler made as good a case for staying in as I could see. Then I read a Ross Douthat column and he made an equally good case for getting out.
Both agree “victory” is unattainable. The question seems to be whether “stalemate” is good or bad.
Douthat says we spent $2 trillion and (aside from enriching thieves and defense industry) in a war that was killing 15,000 Afghanis a year and got nothing beyond a society that collapsed to the Taliban in 10 days. [How many the Taliban will kill unassisted is to be determined.]
Smoler says that, while 40 or more American soldiers would be killed in Afghanistan each year, it “is the business of soldiers to run these risks” and that their deaths would advance America’s interest through our helping Afghani women and girls. [To help put these deaths in perspective, if 5,000 American troops remained in Afghanistan and 40 were killed annually, the death rate would be .008 %. There are about 700,000 policemen in America. Last year 264 were killed, a death rate of .0004%, which, if my math is correct, is 1/20th of the expected best-case-scenario death rate for the soldiers Smoler would leave in Afghanistan.]
Frankly, I don’t know. I am glad it is not my decision. (Why anyone would want to be in a position to make decisions like that, I do not know.) I feel badly about what may happen to Afghani women and girls. but if their future is in our country’s interest, what about the futures of women and girls in many other countries (and Texas), not to mention the interests of other minorities, racial, religious, sexual preference? Is the only difference that we went into Afghanistan 20 years ago and fucked it up directly?
I come back to a sort-of bemused, baseline, keep-my-on-it-with-curiosity, hopeless position. There is something in human beings which causes too many of us to do terrible things to other human beings. Over the centuries, the nature of these terrible things may have modified. (Worldwide, if not the US, I read, income inequality is narrowing and life expectancies are increasing.) But meanwhile the planet is rushing toward destruction faster than we can apply the brakes.
Well, time to stop and, in a nod to my equally bemused optimism, turn to meeting my daily quota of getting letters out on behalf of Working America.
-Bob Levin
Facing Reality
40 a year was not a best-case estimate–I didn’t mean to say at least 40 American soldiers would certainly die each year, in part because we can’t know the future military cost of minimally backing Afghanistan’s armed forces in an alternate world in which Biden had renounced Trump’s deal and restored a few thousand troops to our garrison there, and in part because I was trying to be more than fair to the case for withdrawal: in the years 2016 to Biden’s announced total withdrawal,104 American solders died in Afghanistan, just over 20 a year, so I doubled the number to lower the risk of minimizing a hypothetical future average loss. This alternate future, now one I think unattainable, is hard to model because in it there’d still be a large Afghan army backed by American as well as still-functioning Afghan air power–those only disappeared when, for perfectly understandable reasons, they thought we’d shouted “Sauve qui peut!”. But those forces would continue to be cheated and starved by their own political masters unless Biden managed something that had eluded us since 2002. Had Trump not pulled out so many of our forces it might not have lost control of almost all the roads, which made its military situation much worse. There are some modest grounds for optimism about a relatively stable stalemate achieved via this alternate-historical path: as a rule, many more armies can successfully defend fixed positions than can conduct either maneuver warfare or fight effective counterinsurgency campaigns, and as far as I am aware, the Taliban never successfully routed troops backed by significant U.S. airpower.
Also, while I’ve myself been using the phrase “Texas Taliban” for their Republican party, a) that’s in a way morally frivolous, since Texan women are still allowed to leave their homes without the presence of a male relative, which was not the case under the last Taliban government, so far run no risk of the criminal justice system amputating their fingertips for wearing nail polish, are allowed to work and (in may cases) vote, etc., so Afghan women’s situation is indescribably worse than that of Texan women and b) yes, Bob Levin’s right, it feels different because we fucked it up directly. The probable and certainly predictable total loss of liberty for Afghanistan’s women will happen, if it happens, because of two things we did: assist them, and then abandon them. I was not asking Biden to go abroad in search of monsters to slay–we had gone abroad twenty years ago, chased off some monsters, wisely or unwisely stayed around, and Biden is now abandoning them to those monsters. Afghanistan is for several reasons a very hard place for us to fight–logistical and other access, the weakness of its startlingly kleptocratic state elites, the amazing treachery and malice of factions within Pakistan security apparatus, etc. Very hard places to fight are sometimes nonetheless where one must fight, or where for good reasons or bad one chooses to fight.
-Fredric Smoler
Addendum: The New Yorker just posted Anand Gopal’s The Other Afghan Women. Gopal reports on the condition of rural women, arguing that life in the countryside during the civil war between the Taliban and Coalition forces has been defined by “pure hazard”: “even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.” Gopal notes “the Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness…
This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another?
Smoler’s responds to Gopal’s piece below:
An Arab proverb is alleged to say “Better a hundred years of tyranny than a night of anarchy”, and our own tradition stars Hobbes, for whom the alternative to tyranny is civil war, and there’s nothing worse. These were arguments for the Taliban when they first won, and in the first period of the first Taliban government were apparently persuasive to many people, perhaps with the unspoken addition that under the Taliban some of them legally rape their involuntary child brides, while under the warlords rape is much more widespread and not ‘legalized’ via forced marriages. To this one could add: some of the Taliban may be drug-dealing child-rapists who marry their victims against their will, but they are not corrupt—put more pessimistically, they do not really have a state, so there’s not yet a state to loot, and more optimistically, they suppressed many of the horrors of civil war.
I do not understand the idea that the women in the cities get their freedom at the expense of the women in the countryside—I can imagine an argument that the women in the countryside bear the dreadful brunt of the war that kept the cities ‘free’, but the answer to that may have been to try harder to reduce the cost we and our allies inflicted on the women of countryside—which we did, and sometimes succeeded—rather than abandon the women of the city to the fate of a Taliban-ruled countryside. Is the counterargument that liberty for any Afghan women makes the Taliban more determined to repress the ones they can get their hands on, thus ‘at the expense’. That’s not necessarily a bad description of a part of what happened under the Khalq regime the Soviets intervened to try to save, or rather to preserve some kind of Communist-aligned government in Afghanistan. I seem to remember that their next proxies, the Parcham faction, tried to pacify the mujahideen by greatly deemphasizing female emancipation. It didn’t work.
Taking Gopal’s numbers as uncontested, a counterargument might be, is it better if 70% of Afghan women have no rights, or if 100% of Afghan women have no rights? Better ideas and maybe some justice can trickle out of cities under the regime we just abandoned, and modernity means more and more people tend to move to cities, but Gopal seems prudently doubtful that any rights for women will trickle out of Taliban-controlled cities. The revived and awful warlord militias were more prominent in the beginning of the American war, I think they were then to a degree cut back, and I think some returned as we reduced our support for the Afghan National Army, very crudely comparable to the way the Shiite militias in Iraq, which never went away, came back like gangbusters when ISIS exploited our partial abandonment of the Iraqi National Army. Maybe militias and a viciously and self-destructively corrupt state are what you probably get when you don’t want to do nation-building, are in any case not very good at it, and are, as you probably should be, at most a very, very faint-hearted, deeply uneasy and skeptical imperialist. So maybe the question comes down to choosing the very bad, or what we may take to be the probably infinitely worse. We all have our prejudices, and the sexual regime the Taliban imposed and will probably impose again offends something elemental in the kind of liberalism we grew up with–it’s rather like our disgust at the revived attempt to disenfranchise many Black American voters. On the other hand, while I’m not a Hobbist, I’ve read him, and one aspect of his argument, disturbingly strong, may have prevailed with many Afghans in 1996. Even Mill said that some at some periods can hope only for the rule of an Akbar or a Charlemagne, which if true is irrelevant, because on past form the Taliban are extremely unlikely to be either. On their view voting itself is as un-Islamic as women not under the direct control of a male relative, or a man with the wrong kind of beard or a clear but peaceful political argument against “Islamic” rule. There’s perhaps a better case for not trying to bring the things we brought than for bringing them to millions, and then after a generation dumping those millions into something they now find terrifying. Gopal has been there, a lot, which is to be respected. A good friend of mine was also there a few times, and once did a very good and cheering piece about an American who built schools for girls, not in the cities but in the countryside. He’s in the bleakest despair.